


angels of death

by clickingkeyboards



Category: Murder Most Unladylike Series - Robin Stevens
Genre: (with Death), Alternate Universe - Dark, Detectives, F/F, Flirting, Gore, M/M, dark au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-27
Updated: 2020-12-26
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:27:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 17
Words: 30,914
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26688166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clickingkeyboards/pseuds/clickingkeyboards
Summary: After a lull in cases at their agency, Priestley presents Hazel and Alexander with a rather challenging task: a newly-emerging serial killer, with a horrifying way to connect all of their crimes.As Alexander is charmed by an old classmate and Hazel is flustered by a flirtatious young woman who used to be a good friend, a darker truth lurks beneath the surface.A pity that the killers are so pretty.
Relationships: Alexander Arcady & Hazel Wong, Alexander Arcady/George Mukherjee, Daisy Wells/Hazel Wong
Comments: 18
Kudos: 37





	1. put your best face on

Striding into our office and dropping a stack of files on my desk, Inspector Priestley says, “Hazel, Alexander, I have a job for you.”

“It had better be more interesting than our last case, Inspector!” Alexander says boldly, sitting up at his desk and falling forward to rest his chin on his hands.

Playfully indignant, Priestly smiles and says, “That wasn’t too boring!”

“It was a missing stapler, sir!” Even though I am in the middle of a case report for our last case but one, I would jump at the chance to do something that isn’t sitting behind a desk.

“I know I keep saying that I wish the crims would take a holiday but I’m starting to go back on that. This is just tiresome!” Alexander has been complaining in the exact same vein for about three days, and I am just as bored as him.

“Shush, both of you!” Priestley’s serious voice catches my attention, and even more so when he declares, “We have a serial killer on our hands.”

Alexander catches my eye, and I find myself grinning.

* * *

“This murderer likes threes,” Alexander comments the next day. He’s eating his lunch with his feet propped up on his desk, and I’m pinning up the photos of the bodies on our enormous cork board. The second murder boasts a rather disturbing array of teeth that we discovered on our visit to the morgue. Priestly doesn’t understand how Alexander can stomach his lunch. It’s a talent the pair of us have: no matter how disgusting a crime scene or a case or a corpse, neither of us ever lose our appetites. If anything, they make us hungrier.

“Three _different_ knives were used in this second one.” I shudder, and I take the piece of card that Alexander offers out. He has scrawled ‘rule of three’ on it, and I pin it beside the paper that fact is written on. “What about the first?”

“Three things were stolen. A watch, a shoelace, and the chain of the cross necklace. The cross was left behind, p—”

“I know.” I might be harsher than necessary, but the image of finding a cross pendant underneath the tongue of the second victim is so fierce behind my eyes that it hasn’t left since the moment that we discovered it. “If there’s been two murders in the same place…”

Alexander swings his legs off the desk without another word. “Good _shout_ , Hazel!” he says approvingly.

Together, jostling each other and joking, we rush down the halls to Priestley’s office to tell him that we’re leaving to scout around the university.

* * *

“Why, Alexander Arcady, is that you?” calls a familiar voice, and I turn around so fast that I lose track of the shifting black-coated woman. When I glance back, she has vanished into the crowd. 

George Mukherjee was a dear friend of mine at school. Our paths in life carried us apart but it is always a treat to see him. When we were at school together, he was always put together and intelligent, flirtatious with boyish charm and prettiness, and he seems to have only got handsomer with age.

“George! How have you been?” I ask, rushing forward and briefly forgetting my duties to survey the area. George pulls me into a brief hug before letting me go, looking me up and down in the searching way that always made me squirm when we were fourteen.

“Excellent. And yourself, Alex?” With a raised eyebrow, he adds, “Still no facial hair to speak of, I see?”

Touching a hand to my jaw, I mutter, “Oh, shut up. Hazel makes me shave.” I can’t shoot back a retort, no matter how much I want to; just like when we were fifteen, my intelligent chatter seems to have become entirely superficial and my flirtatious abilities have deserted me. Plus, any retort would be false, given that George has grown a rather handsome beard since we last spoke. 

“Girlfriend?” He raises an eyebrow again — because of course he can do that — and looks infuriatingly good while doing it. 

“No, work partner. She says that I look so horrifying with a beard that she can’t look at me.” The image of Hazel waving a razor at me in a mildly threatening manner on the third day that I came into work with a beard is one that won’t leave my mind soon. 

He barks a laugh. “She sounds quite the girl.”

“She is indeed! Where are you working nowadays?”

“Here and there.” He glances down at his watch and then back to me. “With the law, like you, but on the courtroom side of things. I’m studying an extended law course.”

“Of course you’re still in education. You were always so damn clever.”

He chuckles. “It was all dedication, Alex. How about you, what are you up to these days?”

“Detecting. It’s what brings me here today, actually.”

“Oh?” He steps closer to me, reaching out an arm and guiding me over to the side of the hallway. The enormous corridors in this building are light and airy, and it’s all so old-fashioned that it reminds me of dear old Weston. It may be filled with scholars going to specialised talks instead of students pulling pranks, and businessmen holding meetings in unmarked conference rooms instead of teachers dishing out of punishments, and interesting historical lectures being by eccentric professors as opposed to droning old teachers, but George Mukherjee is standing far too close and making my heart flutter, and the differences seem secondary.

“I’m detecting some murders — surely you’ve heard?”

Leaning up against the stone wall, he says, “Ah, the coppers have set you on the case?”

“We were called in privately by the university.” Feeling some of my confidence coming back to me — perhaps because I was bowled over by George’s boyish charm seven years ago but I can work with his rugged handsomeness now — I say, “Your hatred of the police is still abound, I see?”

“And yours isn’t? We ought to start spending more time together if you’re trusting those bastards again.” He glances down at his watch — beautifully gold with some smudges of unkempt rusty damage that surprise me — and says, “Blast.”

“Got somewhere to be?”

“This isn’t my university but I’m here today for some law lectures.” Straightening his tie, he says, “I really must dash. Well, it was lovely to see you, Alex.”

“You too!” I assure him, and I must be beaming from ear to ear. “It’s been far too long, really.”

He reaches into his pocket and hands me a business card. “Old-fashioned, I know.”

Laughing, I tuck it into my pocket and say, “They complete the aesthetic, don’t they?”

With a low chuckle, he brushes past me and whispers in my ear, “Call me, Alexander.”

There is a chill that shoots up and down my spine as I turn to watch him stroll across the hall and vanish into the press of the crowd.

* * *

Hazel has secured the crime scene and is nearly sobbing over the corpse when I push past the camera-wielding students and rush into the room. She is crouched beside the body wearing gloves and dusting for prints, and the knees of her trousers are drenched in blood. “Alexander!” she shouts, leaping to her feet. “Oh, thank goodness. I’ve just dusted for prints. I’m going to look around the room, you can put on some gloves and do the rest of the body. Maybe check inside the shoes? We don’t want to miss anything, not after—”

I don’t need her to finish her sentence. When we finally got to look at the body of the second victim in the morgue, we found the missing teeth of the first victim inside the hollowed-out soles of the second’s shoes.

“Do you reckon the watch is hidden somewhere?” Hazel asks as she takes out her magnifying glass. She looks quite green and I don’t blame her — our victim looks quite purple in the face after the strangulation and it makes me sick to look at. I no longer faint at the sight of the corpse but situations like this bring me close. It’s as if I’m waiting for a nasty surprise. 

“This killer clearly wants us to know that all the murders are connected,” I agree as I untie the laces of the shoes (which is difficult to do with gloves).

Making a thoughtful noise, she says, “They’re either meaningful—”

“—or we’re dealing with Jack the Ripper.”

As she studies the possible entrance routes to the room, wondering how the killer could have crept in without being seen, Hazel muses aloud. “Alexander, maybe the watch is sewn into…”

She trails off with a mischievous tone to her voice and I scold, “Hazel, don’t joke about genitals when we’re on a crime scene.”

As she giggles and pointedly doesn’t look at the body, I take off the left shoe and pull back the insole. “Hazel,” I say, almost numb with surprise. “Hazel, there’s a _note_.”

Making a noise of surprise, Hazel rushes over and crouches behind me, shielding her eyes from the corpse. “‘Rather pretty eyes, Detective.’”

* * *

“‘Rather pretty eyes, Detective.’” Hazel sticks a pin into the note triumphantly and says, “Alexander, pretty is a word that people call girls! It’s totally meant for me!”

Rolling my eyes, I say, “Please, Hazel, if they were complimenting you, they’d compliment your hair or your smile! Your eyes aren’t nearly the prettiest part of you.”

“Aw, thank you!” She pauses and flusters, and shoots me a half-scowl as she sits down at her desk. “Wait, no! It’s still definitely meant for me.”

“But people call _boys_ pretty!” George Mukherjee certainly is, I find myself thinking. While Hazel chuckles to herself and answers Lavinia’s latest email, I take the business card from my pocket. It’s crumpled, as papers in my presence always tend to get, but I can read the number. After deliberating for a second, I send, _Is this George Mukherjee?_

“I was first on the scene!” she argues.

“And I was the one who found it!”

Priestley sticks his head into our office, looking rather concerned. “Excuse me, detectives. Pardon me for asking but are you arguing over which of you a flirtatious note left by a _serial killer_ was meant for?”

Hazel laughs out loud and so do I, but it’s interrupted by my phone going off. “Ooh, who’s texting _you_?” Hazel asks.

I decide that I’ll tell her about George over post-crime scene drinks tonight. “Nobody particular,” I say, raising my eyebrows at her.

“You’re filing the reports for the next murder,” she huffs as she gets to work.

Even though it’s entirely dependent on who is on the scene first, I agree because I am willing to break protocol for Hazel Wong.

 _It is indeed!_ he responds. _How was your work?_

_Another murder. Surely you saw on the news?_

I tap my fingers for a moment, but his response comes soon. Hazel raises her eyebrows. _I did, the reports sounded ghastly! Any further into your detective efforts?_

Looking at our murder board, which is lacking a suspicious amount of green and amber for ‘leads’ and ‘solved’, I say, _Nothing whatsoever._

 _Pity,_ he replies. _I hope you can make headway soon. Would you like to get drinks soon? We can reminisce on Weston._

The line flashes on my screen for a moment as I wait, unsure of how to respond. _Do you do this with all old school friends?_ I reply, hoping that my teasing gets across.

_Only if they’re willing._

Compelled by the odd way that George speaks, I have to know more about what has happened to my dear friend since we went our separate ways. _How does Thursday sound?_

His response makes my heart fly into my throat, and explaining the situation to Hazel is suddenly unable to wait until this evening. _It’s a date, Alexander._


	2. so what if i'm crazy? the best people are

“You got distracted! I can’t believe you, Alexander.” Hazel talks as if she hasn’t been decently distracted herself. “Is he at least worth the disruption of our work?”

Her cheeks are flushed and the bottle of wine on the table is half empty, and Hazel is a relentless tease when she’s drunk. Rolling my eyes at her, I take out my phone and scroll back through years of photos, back to the year that I arrived at Weston. “Here. This is the first week of Second Year. Whatever shitty phone I had in 2012, they’ve all carried over from that.” The photo was taken by Bob, a casual friend who talked even more than I do. In the photo, George and I are comparing editions of The Sign of Four. “We were good friends.”

“Did you like him?” she asks, leaning forward to look at the photo.

“Hazel, I liked _everybody_ when I was a teenager.” It’s not even an exaggeration, and she knows that first hand. We met when we were eighteen, too clever for our lectures and both convinced that we were the smartest person in the room. We kissed and danced and hardly studied in that first year at Cambridge, and fast-tracked through criminology degrees because we had read all of the material ourselves as bored teenagers, devouring textbooks to fill the gaps in our knowledge that our college courses didn’t allow us to explore.

I have since insisted that Hazel is way smarter than me, and definitely too smart to have ever dated me.

She laughs. “You _did_. I can’t believe that you were my first boyfriend.”

Feeling my face heat up, I say, “Shush. Hey, look at this one.”

“Oh my _god_ — okay, he’s totally worth the distraction.” Giggly, Hazel takes my phone and says, “Lavinia’s type.”

I snort. “Is it the communism badge or the jawline?”

Lavinia is part of our agency — in the research division — and accompanies us on potentially dangerous missions. They are hard-eyed and rude and an excellent friend, and the subject of seemingly never-ending jokes about their ‘type’: communists with jawlines.

“Did _he_ like _you_?” she asked, toying with her wine glass.

“He kissed me, but he kissed everyone. Spin the bottle, truth or dare, when we snuck out into town to drink… I think that he just liked to make me blush.”

“And here I am fielding assumptions that my all-girls school was full of scandalous relationships!” Hazel is somewhere beyond indignant and I splutter into my own glass. “I spent the entire five years averting my eyes away from pretty girls in the changing rooms.”

Shrugging, I say, “Stereotypes or something else profound.”

She gives me a pointedly annoyed look. “You’re so _American_.” Then she looks down at my phone, back up at me, and whispers, “Is it a date?”

“What?!” I blurt, and Hazel fixes me with a particularly Priestley-esque stare. “When— when I go out for drinks with George?”

“No, your _other_ drinks date with a handsome old classmate.” Glancing off to the side, she adds, “Let me know what it’s like to kiss someone who actually pulls off a beard.”

“Shut up, Hazel Wong.”

* * *

The following morning, the news is decorated with comprehensive accounts of the murders. Despite how narrow-minded and dramatic public coverage can be, the fresh perspectives and graphic descriptions and new angles on the murders are always welcomed. We’ve learnt the hard way that people do often mimic murders from shows that neither of us have seen.

“Hazel!” Alexander greets me jovially, and I find myself beaming back at him. “News articles today — the public are beyond excited. There are calls to call this one the new Jack the Ripper.”

It’s slightly thrilling to refer to us as apart from the public, as if we could be invincible. “Excellent!” I say, trying to match his enthusiasm.

“Do you think that our killer is done? They had their three, didn’t they?”

I pull a face that he can’t see. “I don’t think so. Serial killers don’t stop until they’re caught.”

“Good point!” Alexander turns on his monitor with a flourish. “Got any plans tonight?”

“I’m baking some apple crumble for May’s birthday and wrapping my present for her,” I explain, already smelling the berries and apples and looking forward to not caring about anything other than ingredients for a while. “You?”

“Oh, lovely! She’s turning… oh, twelve, isn’t it?”

The fact that Alexander cares enough to remember my littlest sister’s birthday makes me feel warm. “She is! It feels like yesterday that she was absolutely tiny.”

“I’m probably going to swallow my pride and get some tidying done,” Alexander says, and I can’t help but laugh. No matter how hard he tries, he creates a mess wherever he walks. “Beanie and I are getting together to watch Bake Off. We’re ordering Dominoes and everything.”

“Damn, that’s tonight?” Unlike when I was in Year 11, when watching Bake Off every Tuesday was the only thing that bookmarked the end of my revision for that night, I don’t revolve my working schedule around colourful cakes. “I’ll need to bake that crumble as soon as I get home. Ah Lan and I Facetime while we watch it.”

“Nice! That’s commitment.” Alexander grins, and I shake my head at him fondly. Ah Lan is a young man who worked for my family in Hong Kong for years before applying for a charity programme in South America. Since then, he’s never been in one country for more than six months. “We should watch it together next week. You said that Ah Lan’s busy all next week.”

“He is! Moving _again_.”

Rolling his eyes, Alexander says, “Of course he is. Where’s he off to this time?”

“Oslo, of all places. ‘least I can visit him easier than when he was in _Japan_.” I try and force all my bitterness about that particular travel nightmare into one sentence, and Alexander laughs. He was kept updated on my hellish journey to Japan through what felt like hundreds of cancellations, as well as the alarming detour to a tiny airport in Russia.

“That’s good!” Sighing as a webpage loads, he says, “I’m hoping that this case conveniently drags out over Thanksgiving. I might die if I have to sit through that travesty again.”

Laughing, I open up another report. _A Killer That Deserves A Name_ , the article is called. It’s a dramatic title, and I couldn’t agree more. It’s beautifully well-written, showing an in-depth knowledge of the justice system and how it contrasts with private detecting. They describe the crime without shadow and theorise as to the connected nature, developing points that Alexander and I have yet to even consider when our minds are warped from the sheer horror of the bodies.

“This article is fantastic!” I say, and I go to send it Alexander when something catches my eye. The name of the author isn’t one that I’ve seen before, despite extensive interest in crime reporting, and yet I _know_ it.

Daisy Wells.

We were sure friends at school, stumbling across several crimes in the classroom and spending several holidays together. Although life has forced us apart, we were good friends for years and still follow each other on Instagram, often discussing a new book or one of my cases, and I do try to keep tabs on where Daisy’s short attention span and love of crime have taken her in life. That _somewhere_ appears to be journalism.

When I reread the article, I hear her voice and her calling me ‘Watson’ while eating sweets from her tuck box and devouring a crime novel hidden underneath cakes and biscuits. I feel a draw towards the name on my screen and I barely hear it when Alexander asks if I’m alright.

* * *

The morgue is not a pleasant place to be at the best of times, but it is significantly improved when I know that I’m only there because Alexander is doing my least favourite part of detecting: interviewing old white men.

I flash my badge and step into the room that the desk attendant directed me to. My hair is tied back in plaits already, but I must put on a mask and cover my hands with gloves. When I walk inside somebody is already there, standing with an I-Pad and talking to the diener in professional tones. I knock to make my presence known, and both of them turn to stare. I know the diener well enough, but the blonde is a presence new to the morgue. She recognises me before I can put my finger on where I know her from.

“Hazel Wong!” Daisy Wells cries, rushing around the table with the body on it and slamming into me with all her weight. “Goodness, I wouldn’t have recognised you without the schoolgirl plaits! It’s been _so_ long since I saw you in person!” There is some satisfaction in knowing that I am still one of the people that Daisy Wells acts herself around.

“Daisy!” I say quite breathlessly, and when she pulls away I see that she is just as pink-cheeked and pretty as when we were eighteen. “How good to see you! What brings you here?”

“I’m a crime journalist now!” she says, tossing her golden hair. It’s still beautifully long and golden, only tied back in an elastic per morgue regulations. “I’m in training to become a forensic pathologist.”

Moving to examine the corpse, I tell her, “I read your article this morning. It was wonderful.”

“Thank you! I wouldn’t trust anybody but you on the case, honestly. The police are _such_ idiots.”

We smile at each other, and then Daisy goes back to her interview and I start examining the corpse. It feels like our schooldays relived quite inside out. I check the shoes again, and then I unbutton the lecturer’s smart trousers and runs my hands about the waistband. Daisy raises her eyebrows at me and I stick my tongue out at her. It is as if we are thirteen, only much more grown and much less silly.

Inside the waistband is a curious lump. I request a scalpel and slit the fabric at the seam, and reach inside to find… a shoelace.

Not only that, but the missing shoelace from the first murder.

The cross necklace was found on the body, only moved. The teeth were found inside the soles of the shoes of the second victim. The shoelace is here, inside the waistband of the third victim. The only missing item that has yet to turn up is… the watch.

Daisy makes eye contact with me. “Found something, Watson?”

I do something incredibly unprofessional then, something rash and confident and simply not Hazel-ish: I ask for her number.


	3. darling, won’t you ease my worried mind?

“That’s rather Macbeth.”

Alexander shoots a weak glare at them and sounds sick when he says, “Shut up, Lavinia.”

Laughing into their hand, they say, “It is! He’s been  _ unseamed _ .”

Alexander deals a sharp kick to their ankle. “Shut  _ up _ .”

Although horrifying, Lavinia’s statement is true. ‘From the nave to the chaps’ indeed. The man who has been murdered is a neurological doctor and the incision is aggressive with almost surgical precision — from the naval to the hips — and the blood has pooled in the cut in a curious half-clotted way. His long hair has been shorn from his head with no sign of where it’s gone.

“I’ll take everything left of the body. You take the right?” Alexander suggests.

I look past the blood and to the left of the man’s office, a wall decorated with awards and a window looking out over London. “Good idea.”

Lavinia stands at the door, fending off reporters and the curious public, and Alexander and I busy ourselves trying not to vomit. When I consult a photo of the doctor from the security footage — no lead from that, the cables to the cameras were cut with a knife and decorated with a sticky-note bearing the words ‘nice try’ — I notice that he’s missing a stethoscope. Though it hurts my head to do it, I rush towards the body and, with a feeling of trepidation creeping into my throat, turn his head this way and that.

“No stethoscope,” I say, brushing my hands on my skirt and leaving it smudged with blood.

Alexander groans. “We’re going to find out next victim strangled with the thing, aren’t we?”

“Knowing our luck.” I peer at the doctor’s jacket. The shirt and undershirt soaked up most of the blood, and the slit through his stomach is crudely around the buttons of his shirt. Surprisingly, his collar is intact enough for me to notice that it’s twisted askew. “I think… I think he’s missing a tie.”

“Lovely. Hanging opportunity, no doubt.” Alexander is in a sour mood today, and I wonder if it has something to do with his prospective date. He turns sharply on his heel, looking rather green, and walks over to examine the body with me. We move up and down, mirroring each other, and Alexander is the one to notice a missing pin badge.

“Look, it was originally here—” Proud of his discovery, he points across the man’s chest and his sleeve, with the button undone, dips into the disgusting mess pooling in the cut. “Oh.”

In a stumbling rush, he stands up and brushes his hands over it, only succeeding in smearing his hands and then his face with blood. “I’m sorry, Hazel,” he mutters, before being neatly sick into the wastepaper basket.

* * *

When we get back, both of us are in low spirits and smeared with blood. Even after changing into spare sets of clothes and washing our hands thoroughly, we both feel dirty, with this feeling underneath our fingernails that we can’t escape. Beanie and Kitty grace our office with Chinese food and laughter, much to my relief.

Alexander puts his feet up on his desk and Beanie sits on top of a low filing cabinet, while Kitty sits on my desk (which is far tider than Alexander’s). “Any big plans?” Kitty teases, swinging her legs. She’s one of our researchers who does her job simply to make her money (and because it’s being a professional at gossip), and she has beautiful light brown hair, pink lipstick, and dramatic earrings.

While eating a dumpling, talking with my mouth full, I say, “He’s got a date.”

“It’s not a date!” he protests.

“Ooh? Who is it?” Beanie is one of our chief interrogators and specialises in dealing with the young children affected by our cases. She’s tall and lanky with a long rope of dark brown hair and big eyes of two different colours, and she wears enormous cosy jumpers and leggings.

“Tell me everything!” Kitty speaks in  _ demands _ when romance is concerned. “What’s his name? Have you met him before? Is he cute?”

Alexander presses his face against the table and swears at me. “Fuck you, Hazel Wong.”

“What are you wearing for it? Where are you going?”

I feel bad, putting him on the receiving end of Kitty’s gossip magnet, so I say, “He’s going out for drinks with an old school friend who flirted with him and said ‘it’s a date’. And I’ve seen pictures: he’s  _ cute _ .”

Knowing that he can’t escape Kitty’s attention (and even Beanie is giggling), he signs and swallows a mouthful of rice before saying, “His name is George Mukherjee. We were school friends, and I bumped into him the other day when we were scouting around the university.”

After some needling, he shows them a photo. Kitty squeals and Beanie says, “Ooh! Let us know how it goes!”

“And send me photos of prospective outfits. I don’t trust you, Arcady.”

* * *

George looks rather stunning in the low light of a bar. He waves me over and calls me fashionably late, straightening out his jacket. “Alexander!” he shouts, and I take the seat opposite him. I remember absently thinking, years ago, that dating George would feel like a courtship. When he takes my hand and presses a kiss to my knuckles, glittering up at me as he does so, I know that I was right. Despite being fantastically romantic at sixteen, I was right.

“How was your day?” I ask him, trying to seem casual.

“Nothing too eventful. I was slighted by a friend in what  _ she  _ deemed a funny joke, but I shall get her back.”

I chuckle, remembering the war of practical jokes between our year group and the one above. When I say so, George laughs too, and we reminisce for a moment on some of the greater ideas, and the fantastic flaming failures. “Twining raked us over the coals for that one. I mean, we damn deserved it,” I say, and he scoffs.

“I dare say that it was a stroke of genius that he simply didn’t understand!” he teases. “How was your day?”

“Unfortunately eventful,” I say, pulling a face. I almost thank George for ordering me something particularly strong. “Another murder. I think that the bodies will start falling at our feet soon.”

He makes a sympathetic noise and leans forward. “I can’t imagine. Do tell me about the cases, if you’re comfortable. I remember you being so squeamish in our school days. And you were so easy to fluster, too!”

“That has  _ not  _ changed. Hazel scolds me a lot for it, y’know. I’ve only taken a fancy to one or two suspects, honestly.”

Rolling his eyes, he says, “Two suspects too many. Go on, then, what was the case from today like?”

I find myself talking. Hazel would berate me for sharing case details, much like she berates Lavinia when they bring their phone to photograph the crime scene, but it doesn’t matter in the slightest. George is charmingly sympathetic, holding my hand across the table and blinking in the low light, encouraging me along with soft words as I recount the events of that morning. Though I’m red-faced and embarrassed, I manage to regurgitate all the horrible details, even those of me losing my breakfast into the wastepaper basket after smudging blood over my face.

“I’m somehow not shocked by your aversion to blood, Alex,” he says with a low chuckle. “But— how horrible! Do you have any leads on who it could be?”

“None at all. There aren’t any complete maniacs on file — we keep records, y’know, those with troubling patterns who say concerning things, though with a history of animal cruelty, odd associations, gambling problems—”

Making an approving noise, George says, “You’re much more skilled than the police. You’ll have this killer in no time. A shame that there are already four fatalities.”

“This killer doesn’t strike and miss,” I note, feeling melancholy as I stare into the bottom of my glass. “As usual, I wished for a case and I’m now wishing for boredom again.”

“It’s natural to want excitement, and to regret it later. Such is human nature, you know.” He brushes a hand back through dark hair.

Not wanting to dampen the mood further, no matter how curious George seems, I try to tease, “Still interested in psychology?”

He smiles and nods but doesn’t indulge the conversation, seemingly off in another world. “You don’t have to answer this,” he says eventually, in slow tones while he considers the words even as they fall from his mouth, “but I would like to know, just to satiate my curiosity. Did you— at Weston, did you fancy me?”

I give him my most deadpan look. “Who  _ didn’t _ ?”

He barks a loud laugh. “Ha! Yes, yes, boyish fancy and all that. Pashes, they call it in Poirot. That is very different from a crush and you know it, Alex.”

“A little,” I confess, deciding to indulge him. “You were charming and flirtatious, George, and I was so far into the closet I could have found Mr Tumnus.”

“ _ Were _ ?” he asks with a twinkle in his eye. “I’d better step up my game!”

I consider throwing the lemon on the side of my glass at him, and I toy with it as I think.

“If it’s any consolation, I rather liked you too.”

Astonished, I start and stare at him. He merely blinks back, totally disinterested. “How could I not? You were handsome as anything back then. Still are.”

I find myself quite unable to speak. George takes the opportunity to say, “Look, not to be forward, but do you want to quit this? We can take a walk together or whatever takes your fancy. Bars are oppressively loud.”

“I like that idea.”


	4. i won’t say you’re safe this time

“So,” I ask, drawing it out and leaning on my hand as Alexander walks into our office with sparkling eyes, “how was the date?”

His face breaks into an enormous grin and he falls back in his desk chair. “Hazel, he’s perfect.”

“Tell me _everything_.”

With flushed cheeks, Alexander says, “There isn’t much to tell, that’s the oddest part.”

“There has to be _something_.” As he puzzles over what to explain, I turn on my phone and answer a message from my sister, asking me if I’ve seen a certain article about the murders.

Eventually, he begins recounting the details of the evening, talking of the case and reminiscing on old memories, a walk in the park, and a kiss on the cheek. “He’s courting you!” I say in delight, crossing my legs on my chair and spinning myself around to face him. “Alexander, that’s so cute!”

“Shut up.” Awkwardly tugging on his cuffs, he turns back to his computer. “I’m going to follow that Ripper theory, that they’re trying to mirror the Ripper murders. It’s a strong one.”

I nodded. “I’m going to look at the—” I pause when I open my emails. “Oh, nevermind.”

“What is it?” Alexander asks, and I notice his hand edging towards his phone.

“No texting boyfriends during work,” I say, waving my hand at him as if shooing a persistent fly. “It’s from Daisy, the journalist! She was my friend at school, you know.”

Alexander nods. “I remember! You told me about her, at the morgue. She was your first detective partner.”

“Like you and George.”

“Only we had no cases.” Bitter as usual when he talks about his lack of detective success as a teenager, Alexander folds his arms and leans back in his chair. “What’s the email?”

“Look!”

_To Hazel Wong,_

_Seeing you at the morgue was astonishing, and I felt like I was at Deepdean all over again. I told you that I wouldn’t trust anybody but you and Alexander with this case, and that rings true. After reading some of the failing articles of those in the same career as me, I thought that the only hope for inspiring the public in the right direction as to garner you some leads would be an article written by me, with an interview from you._

_Given that it has been since a while since I worked with private detectives, and that the government is throwing guidelines every which way, I do not know if you will be allowed to give me an interview. If you can, let me know and we can set up a time and date that works for both of us. If not, may you contribute to my article anyway? Nobody has to know that a comment here and there from an anonymous source is from one of the two detectives on the case. We’ve always broken rules, Hazel Wong._

_Kind regards,_ _  
_ _Daisy Wells_

“She writes exactly how I’d expect her to write,” Alexander says with a laugh. “She’s fantastic, you ought to give her that interview.”

“I’ll ask Priestley,” I tell him with an excited grin, though I was already replying to her email without a second thought.”

_I would love to give an interview. What time suits you?_

* * *

The call comes into our office while we’re eating lunch, sitting in a cafe a few minutes away and deliberating over some crime scene evidence while eating Cornish pasties. My phone starts madly shrieking the communist anthem, which is what Lavinia set my ringtone for them as, and I answer. “Hazel, Alexander, there’s another one,” they say. “It’s— I’ll send you the location. You need to get there _now_.”

Alexander gives me a wide-eyed look and I nod, and we are on our feet in an instant.

“Northern line?”

Trusting his knowledge of the tube system, I merely nod and follow him as bolts out of the door, only stopping to turn off his laptop.

* * *

Hazel sees the body and says, “Holy fuck.”

I can only agree. It looks as if every single piece of weaponry in the vicinity — we are in a historic house, where a documentary was being filmed, and these places collect swords like Beanie Martineau collects succulents — has been driven into the body. The cause of death appears to have been a beautifully ornate sword, jammed between the third and fourth ribs and right into the heart.

The man has been left where he was found and Hazel, looking rather green, moves to the other side of the room to read a description of the man and his associations, searching for a pattern. I find it odd, somewhere inside my head, that I am not being sick at the sight of such a horrid thing. Something about it is fascinating me, driving away any nausea and disgust and dread, because there is a familiarity that almost impresses me.

Coming to stand at my side, Hazel averts her eyes from the body and says, “What is it?”

“So many injuries,” I mumbled, talking to myself more than her. “It’s as if they were trying to…”

It hits me all at once, like a weight coming down on my chest. “I know what it is!” I blurt, and Hazel gives me an incredulous sideways look.

“ _How?_ It’s just an awful bloody mess.”

“I studied it, years ago, obsessed over it.” I’m talking fast, and I know that I’m making no sense. I can’t help it, not when faced with such a genius murder method executed to near perfection. “It’s an ancient medical… thing. A diagram, with different injuries drawn on it, and annotated to show how to treat them. It’s… they’ve done it. It’s almost perfect, exactly how the diagram looks.”

Looking like she may be sick there and then, Hazel opens up the Wound Man diagram on her phone and hands it to me. “Is it is?”

I nod. “Yes. Yes, it is.”

As I study the body, comparing the precision and reading the annotations on the image to determine what each injury did and how it contributed to his cause of death, working out what order they were inflicted in, a twist of disgust at myself lodges inside my mind. I have always been so horrified by murder, found the very idea abhorrent. I have never had Hazel’s tolerance for bodies, or the appreciation for criminals that George had when we were younger, or the admiration of murder methods that Daisy has in all of Hazel’s retellings of their cases. I have always been sensible, disgusted, sickened. I have never thought of a murder method as beautiful, and it frightens me that there is something dark inside me that has a sick appreciation for what has been done.

Only… I can’t help it. It is impossible to force myself into sickness and horror no matter how hard I try. The case has captured me, and I feel as if I am looking at a work of art.

* * *

We spent so long at the crime scene that we were forced to go our separate ways afterwards, left to compartmentalise the crime separately and fall into fitful sleeps. When we get into the office the next morning, I cannot help but look at Alexander oddly. I have never seen him so taken in by a murder method before, nor have I witness the sheer excitement that comes over him as he talks. It reminds me of Daisy, how deeply she appreciated some of the more genius cases that we detected as teenagers. Seeing traits that are so quintessentially Daisy reflected in Alexander is somewhere just on the edge of disturbing, almost comforting. With somebody so obsessed with what has just happened, I feel as if I could take on anything.

“You’re disturbed, Alexander,” Lavinia tells him through a mouthful of sushi, eating lunch in our office as we talk the other three through the murder.

“Oh, let him be intrigued,” Kitty scolds, giving Alexander a glittering look.

Beanie is sitting with her hands over the face, not wanting to look at the photos. Irritated at having such a bad seat and being unable to see the photos, Lavinia says, “Beanie, go and sit at Alexander’s desk and hide behind the monitor. I wanna look at the body.”

Making a whimpering noise, Beanie obliges them and sits down in Alexander’s desk chair, and stops her quiet noises of disgust very suddenly when she opens her eyes.

I look back at the murder board, at the photos that Alexander and I have been pinning up and connecting to the others, drawing similarities and comparing methods. It is as I am talking over how the stethoscope stolen from the last victim was used to cause the strangulation injury that you see on the diagram that I notice something, a piece of wool hanging down and a pin on the floor. “Something’s missing from the board.”

Alexander says, “God, it is! What _is_ it?”

We start to see where it could have fallen to, and are just about to call for Priestley when Beanie says, “I know where it is.”

With shaking hands, she holds up something that she has found on Alexander’s desk: a scrap of paper, with _rather pretty eyes, Detective_ written on it in bold black flourishes.

“Why is it over there?” I wonder aloud, walking over to take it from Beanie’s hands. As I take it from her, I think that she has probably spooked herself into thinking that it’s the work of a ghost. Why else would she be shaking so?

I turn it over in my palm, and I see it in an instant. On the other side, in something red and blotchy that looks scratchy and difficult to write with, are the words ‘ _It’s polite to return a compliment, Alexander’_.

I crumple the note in my palm by accident when I clench my fist, and I feel the creeping dread spreading through me as I fear for Alexander’s life.


	5. you’ve got those eyes that drive me crazy (and i’ve got eyes to watch you sleep)

We’ve never had this happen before. Never such an open threat. Never something scrawled in blood. Never left inside our offices despite all of the security.

Alexander hasn’t said much, only accepted a tight hug and typed out everything in a frantic rush in a report, and again to George, who sweetly offers condolences and expresses the most genuine, concerned, and loving worry that I have ever seen. Priestley has demanded to know if we can trust everybody that Alexander talks to, and has decided, much to Alexander’s embarrassment, to thoroughly scour the internet and search through everything on Alexander’s only frequent contact outside of the agency: George Mukherjee.

“Are you alright?” I ask him as we’re packing up to leave. Even Lavinia is scared for his health and has offered to drive him home.

He nods. “I’m afraid. But… it’s almost exciting. Not that I prefer this to finding missing staplers. I’d go back to that any day.”

With a laugh, I say, “So would I.”

We walk to the door together, listening to Beanie and Lavinia bickering about whether or not who was voted off of Bake Off on Tuesday was the correct choice. We wait side by side, and I suddenly have an overwhelming urge to throw my arms around him.

I do.

I grip the back of his shirt tightly and say, “Don’t die on me, Alexander. I need you.”

“I won’t,” he mumbles into my hair, trying to sound unafraid, though I can feel the sudden shock of cold from his tears. “I won’t, Hazel, not if I can help it.”

When I look up, I am captured by pretty eyes. One hazel, one green. “Rather pretty eyes, Detective,” I mumble, and we both snort at the morbid joke. 

“Never thought that a killer would fixate on my heterochromia, I always thought that it would be my stunning personality.”

I laugh and shove him, and I do not feel so terrifyingly shaky anymore.

* * *

_You must be terrified. I can’t imagine what they’re planning for you._

The idea that George is worried makes my heart feel a little too big for my chest. _I’m sure that I’ll be fine. The only injury that I’ve sustained recently is tripping up the stairs to my flat and gashing my cheek after getting home from work today._

We talk back and forth for a while and I find myself asking, _When can I see you again?_

_I’m really busy with classes and exams, and a lot of coursework. The only time I’m free for the next few days is tonight._

Feeling terrifyingly daring as an idea sparks in my head, I say, _Come over. We can have a casual date if you’re up for it._

His response is almost instant. _I’d love that! What’s your address?_

I text it to him, and he responds with, _I’ll be there at seven fifteen. Is that alright?_

After telling him that it is, I fly about in an anxious fit, tidying and drawing the curtains shut, and trying to make myself presentable despite the shallow gash where I’ve skinned my cheekbone.

George arrives at seven fifteen exactly, slightly rumpled from the wind and wearing a coat to guard against the light summer chill. “Hey!” I greet him, and he grins at me. When he smiles like that, it wrinkles the smile lines at the corners of his eyes. 

“Good to see you in once piece,” he says softly, rubbing the back of his neck with one hand. “Any plans?”

“Order food, watch a film, whatever else.” I wave a hand, embarrassed at my lack of planning.

George takes off his coat and, after a questioning look, hangs it on the peg beside mine. “Sounds like a party, Alex.”

* * *

George has always had a softer side, one that I rarely saw when we were at school and hadn’t seen again until the moment that he burst out laughing at a joke that I made under my breath, falling against my side with his head on my shoulder.

“We ought to have done this sooner,” he says with a sigh, resting his head on my shoulder. “Don’t you think?”

I agree, and I try to swallow the way that my heartbeat is shaking my whole body as I fold my hand over George’s, where it rests on his knee. “Are you aware that you’re very forward?”

“I have been told that, yes.” I feel his chuckle against me, and then he shifts away, though he doesn’t let go of my hand. “You’re forward too, Alex.”

The film finished hours ago, the food cleared away. It’s almost midnight, and we aren’t even close to running out of things to talk about. I blink myself out of my thoughts to find George staring at me. Curious, as he has never liked eye contact. His dark eyes regard me with so much weight and it feels heavy when I breathe, and then he says, in a soft voice, “Can I kiss you?”

I nod, scarcely able to talk. Careful to avoid the scrape on my right cheekbone, he lifts his hand to cup my face and leans in, and I forget how to breathe.

* * *

“I got a message from Alexander at one in the morning,” I tell Kitty as we sit around in the community area, both drinking tea and rubbing our eyes. “‘Hazel, I think I’m in love’. I wonder how his impromptu date went.”

She laughs. “God, that boy is so in love already.”

“He fell _up_ the stairs to his flat yesterday, grazed his cheek,” I add, and she snorts.

“Our boy broke physics.” With a fond smile, she sips at her tea. “He is silly about love, isn’t he?”

I shrug, thinking of Alexander’s elated updates. “George seems nice enough. He apparently left Alexander’s at, like, half past midnight, and they talked until two, teenager-y Snapchat selfies and all.”

Kitty rolls her eyes. “That has never ended well for me. Seems like Alexander will be the one to prove me wrong.”

After a few other jokes about Kitty’s disastrous dating life (before Beanie, that is), she asks, “Are you going to run that interview past Priestley today?”

“Shit.” I think of my email from Daisy, sitting in my inbox, that I haven’t allowed myself to open. “I’ll do it later today. I need to gauge what kind of mood he’s in. I don’t know if he wants any more publicity, what with Alexander receiving a note written in actual blood from a serial killer.”

“Here’s to Priestley not being in a shit mood.” She holds up her mug and, with a laugh, I bump mine against hers.

* * *

Alexander turns up to work an hour late, crumpled and tired, having slept through his alarm. His date clearly tired him out: usually, no matter how late he stays up, he wakes bright and early with the sun. I suppose that it must be mental exhaustion; a threat from a serial killer must take a psychological toll, though I never want to find out exactly how that feels. The harsh graze on his cheek from the fall that he took is beginning to heal up, and there are some curiously deeper cuts amongst the harsh redness of the shallow injury.

“Hey,” he says breathlessly, rushing into our office and throwing down his bag, hurrying to turn on his computer and make up an hour of work. “How’s Priestley?”

“Up in arms about the blood note, as expected.” After saying that, I’m struck by the sheer ridiculousness of our lives. When did that before a normal sentence that made sense? “If we get word back from the others on the documentary about what they saw, he might be in better spirits and not assign you a babysitter.”

“I damn well hope so,” he says, going to lean on one hand as he usually does when scrolling through articles. With a hiss, he winces away. “God _damn_. That cut hurts like hell.”

Making a noise of vague pity, I start to write up the latest incident report. I am a mere four sentences into writing up my perspective on the Wound Man Murder when somebody frantically knocks on the door of our office. 

“I’ve got an email!” Beanie says excitedly, rushing into our office with her laptop. “Look! Somebody from the documentary team says that they might have seen something.”

_Dear Ms. Martineau,_

_I found your details online, as the person in the Priestley Investigative Agency to contact for information. As your detectives are the ones on the case, it felt only right to contact you._

_My father is working on the documentary that was brought to a screeching halt by poor Curtis Anderson’s murder. I never liked the man; he was far too pompous and interested in the colonial British side of the documentary, even when it’s about the life of an Egyptian woman who rose to high-class brilliance despite prejudices of the time._

_Given my interest in history, even taking a degree in the matter, my father allowed me to be a consultant on the history of the Egyptian history side of the documentary. Despite being sent away before the detectives arrived (my father worries about me, despite the fact that I am a more than capable woman in her twenties), I have information._

_I believe that I may have seen something that could help you. If you think that I could be of assistance, please get in touch._

_Kind regards,_ _  
_ _Amina El Maghrabi_

* * *

The idea of a possible sighting of the killer has Hazel enthralled, and her and Beanie are so excited to interview the person in question that they barely complain about the prospect of the London traffic. The email is a compelling subject, speaking of an intelligent, composed, and well-read young woman. If anybody will give us a promising lead, it will be this Amina El Maghrabi, our only current hope. 

Hours later, I am still researching possible patterns, deep in Jack the Ripper theories and articles on the psyche of serial killers, when I lean on my hand and am once again struck by the stinging of the gash on my cheek.

Deciding to go and press a cloth covered in cold water to hopefully ease the pain, I get up from my chair and walk to the bathroom, fully intending to wet a flannel from the cupboard under the sink and go back to my research. However, that is an impossibly far away idea once I look in the mirror. I am gripped by a burning, sudden fear as I stare into the mirror, at the gash on my cheek.

Woven amongst the pale pink of the scrape are scores driven deep into my skin, clear now that they are filled with blood. Even though the blood has begun to drip down my face like a horror movie poster, the intent is quite clear. 

Across my cheekbone in bold letters is carved the word _PRETTY_.


	6. i can taste your skin in my teeth

I can’t think and I need to leave.

Trying to keep my breath level, I fumble for my phone and call Hazel, running my hand over the thick plaster on my cheek. She answers with a confused, “Alexander?”

“Hey,” I gasp. “Um— how’s the interview going?”

“We’ve only just got to interviewing Amina; we talked to everybody else on the team before talking to her, because her father was super intent upon his daughter having not a jot to do with murder,” Hazel says with a sigh in her voice.

Remembering the few times that I have met Hazel’s father, I remark, “Sounds like another father that I’ve met.”

I can almost  _ see _ her rolling her eyes. “We all know how my dad feels about my line of work, Alexander.” After a thoughtful pause, she adds, “Why the call?”

“Can I— eh, can I come and join you? My research is driving me cracked and I desperately need to hear some fresh perspectives.”

Clearly suspecting me of something, Hazel says, “Alright. I’ll text you the address.”

* * *

Amina is talking about the odd things that she heard the morning of the murder, doors opening and people being checked into rooms and sets twice, when Alexander walks into the room. He looks no more distressed than usual, though quite tired, but both Beanie and I are distracted by the plaster decorating his grazed cheek.

Unsure whether or not the plaster is a common feature, Amina politely holds out a hand and, with a mischievous smile, says, “Amina El Maghrabi at your service. You’re Alexander?”

He nods and takes her hand, shaking it and smiling charmingly as he says, “Alexander Arcady, yes! You’re our most recent hope for the case, I hear?”

She nods a confident set to her jaw, and Beanie finally manages to get out the words that we’re both thinking. “Alexander, why are you wearing such a… dramatic plaster? Your scrape is only tiny!”

He shrugs and smiles at her. “It’s nothing, just… you know, being safe and all that.”

I know that I should leave it alone, that Alexander is overreacting to an injury, or trying to protect his cheek from the stinging October cold. I know that there is no reason for me to be so infuriated by the way that he dodges my questions. And I know that there is no justification for my actions as I fix a hand on his shoulder and rip the plaster from his face.

I am astonished by the amount of blood on the plaster, and so I don’t look up at Alexander’s face again until I hear Amina mutter softly, “ _ Yalahwy _ .”

“What happened?” Beanie asks, her voice filled with trembling worry.

When he speaks again, he sounds broken, like his words are falling apart has he says them. “I… I don’t know. I don’t know how it happened, when it happened… I mean, obviously during the night but I don’t know… how. You’d think that I’d wake up to somebody picking the lock to the front door, and even if not, how did I not feel…” He gestures to his cheek, at the bloody word decorating his face bold as brass.

“Beanie,” I say, and I nod towards Amina. “I’m so sorry, Miss El Maghrabi.”

“Call me Amina,” she says for perhaps the fourteenth time today, and then she smiles. “It’s alright. You’re dealing with something vicious and I commend you.”

Trying to smile in my customer-service way at Amina, trying to treat her as a suspect and not a potential new friend and detective assistant, I practically push Alexander out of the room in a fit of boldness. One of us needs to be, after all, and he seems to have locked up at all of his joints and thrown away the key to his voice box. “Alexander,” I say to him once the door has shut behind us, and we are out in the ornate hall of a historical house. “Alexander,  _ Alexander _ .”

“Hazel…” he whispers, and he brings a hand up to cover his mouth. His mismatched eyes are shining brightly, wide as he stares at me before squeezing them shut, a single tear escaping down his cheek. “Hazel… I’m so afraid.”

To my horror, Alexander begins sobbing there and then, falling to his knees on the plush carpet, and I crouch down to wrap my arms around his shoulders, feeling rather too small inside my skin.

* * *

I slip outside to call George, gripping the wood of the railing to the back porch and feeling the water droplets bursting their water tension underneath my fingertips. “Hey,” I say, not knowing how else to greet him.

“Hey, Alex,” he says, sounding slightly breathless. “What is it? I’m between lectures right now.”

“Oh, sorry. I can call you later if—” I bring my phone away from my ear and go to end the call, apologising all the while, when I hear his protests.

“Alex, it’s alright. I don’t mind. What’s wrong?” His voice is full of warmth and care and I feel like I have to see him tonight or else I will burst.

Wondering how to cobble it together, I manage, “I… the killer, the Ripper, they’ve… they’ve found me, somehow. First the note, then the blood, and now they’ve carved the word  _ pretty _ into my cheek.”

“Oh! Oh,  _ Alexander _ .” He sounds desperately hopeless for a moment, before taking a breath and steadying himself. “You poor thing. Oh— that’s hideous!”

“I don’t want to die,” I whisper.

With complete assurance, George says, “That simply isn’t in the cards for you. Oh— come over to mine tonight, if it’s not too soon. You… I need to see you.”

“I’d love to,” I reply, too filled up with misery and dread to twist in embarrassment and jump for joy. “I don’t feel… safe in my flat tonight.”

“I’ll text you my address, okay? You’re quite safe with me, Alex.”

I don’t smile, too drained for even that, but I feel the tension bleed out of my shoulders. “I know.”

* * *

It’s four in the afternoon and so much has happened — Alexander stumbled into work late at ten and Beanie and I rushed out to interview Amina barely ten minutes later, only for Alexander to turn up with that horrifying word branded across his cheek. 

We take a taxi back to the agency. Priestley takes one look at us, me bedraggled with a tear-stained jumper, Alexander with a word carved into his cheek, and Amina flustered and rushed as we decided to continue our interview with her back at the agency, and declares that he doesn’t care what we do for the rest of the afternoon. In a scolding voice, he reminds us that it’s a Sunday and that it’s our day off and that we shouldn’t even be working.

It’s hard to believe that this insane business all began only last Sunday. 

We finish interviewing Amina but she sticks around, melding into our group with her sense of humour and curious knowledge of true crime. 

We’re drinking hot chocolate and watching Buzzfeed Unsolved when Beanie turns to Alexander and says, “You’re looking gloomy, what’s wrong?”

Counting off on his fingers, he says, “Well, it’s raining, I have ‘You’ll Be Back’ from  _ Hamilton  _ stuck in my head, and a serial killer either wants to flay me or fuck me and I don’t think even they can decide each one.” He is never usually so snappy and short with Beanie, or so blunt and rude and emotionless to anybody, and I just want to throw my arms around him and tell him that it’s all terribly unfair. 

“Maybe make it really clear that you have a boyfriend and then the serial killer will fuck off.”

“I don’t think that serial killers are that polite, Beans,” Kitty says.

“They’re actually known to be charming!” Lavinia calls out from beside the coffee maker. “Ted Bundy, for example—”

Beanie puts her hands over her ears and says, “Lalalalala!” and that swiftly ends the conversation.

As Amina draws us all back together, pointing out something on the screen and making even Lavinia laugh, I take out my phone and see that Daisy Wells has replied to my email.  _ Can we meet next Tuesday? You pick the location, as I picked the date. _

Swallowing the way that my heart races and scolding myself for my schoolgirl feelings resurfacing, I reply with the name of my favourite cafe and like the location too, and sign off formally to keep myself strictly uninterested. I’ll ask Priestley about it on Tuesday morning, though I don’t care what he says. Daisy Wells, even years on, makes me daring, it seems.

* * *

George’s flat is as neat and tidy as he is, though crowded with his personality. Books on true crime and psychology are lined up on the shelves in strict order, and I can see a fashion magazine displaying the latest suits open on the coffee table. On a small side table are several candles, a propped-up portrait, and a prayer book, and I recall one of our many conversations from last night about religion.

He greets me with shining eyes and a kiss after asking if he can. With excited flourishes, he drags me to the living room and shows me a book that we were talking about the previous night. “See here, and this is the line that I mentioned—” he explains, and the only thing interrupting the rapt attention that I want to pay to him is the way that the cuts on my cheek sting underneath my bandage.

George, attentive and clever George, notices the way that I flinch and twitch, and says, “Oh, Alex— do you mind if I take off your plaster? It might stop irritating you as much if you give it some air.”

I nod and lean forward, and he peels it from my cheek with immeasurable care and throws it in the bin before turning back and tracing his finger underneath it, eyes enormous and concerned. “You poor thing,” he murmurs, and then a small smile comes onto his face before he leans forward and presses a kiss to my cheek. “If it’s any consolation… if you want, I can kiss you until you don’t associate the cut with anything but how pretty  _ I  _ think you are.”

“That’s going to be hard but if anybody can distract me from a serial killer’s brand, it’s you,” I say, forcing myself to keep my eyes open if only to focus on how lovingly he stares into them.

“Is that a challenge, Alexander?” he asks with a smile, teasing as usual.

“Naturally.”


	7. unpick it at the seam

It is hard to take a day off in the middle of the case, but Alexander and I were so exhausted from the events of the weekend that we happily both spent most of Monday sleeping.

On Tuesday morning, Alexander comes into work without a bandage on his cheek. “The photo of me that some dickhead took at the house is all over the news, why should I bother to hide it?” he says when Kitty questions it.

“Maybe so that the killer doesn’t get the satisfaction of admiring his sick handiwork?” Lavinia calls out from their customary position on the countertop beside the coffee maker. 

From where she is adjusting her tights with her feet propped up on the coffee table, Kitty says, “I’m sure that he did more than enough of that while watching Alexander sleep.”

Beanie, looking rather sick at the thought, comments on the new look that Alexander is sporting on his cheek, every letter of the cut stitched up and making it horrifyingly more obvious. “You went to A&E?” she asks, curling up in her usual chair in the main room with a mug of tea in her hands.

Smiling at her reassuringly, he falls back on his assigned end of the sofa and says, “George said that I ought, because it’s such an open wound. Most of the scrape around it has healed but the word… it’s going to be there for a while, they said, and that it’s going to scar terribly. They stitched it because the cuts were only getting worse. Clever knife work, they said. You’ll never believe it but—” He puts a fist to his closed mouth and blanches, before swallowing hard and taking a steadying breath. “It was cut in such a way that it would tear and worsen over time, and never heal closed if it wasn’t for the stitches.”

“That’s horrifying,” I breathe. On impulse, a reflex from when we were so much younger and holding hands meant an exciting everything rather than a familiarly comforting nothing, I lean over and kiss his cheek, before reaching up and putting a hand on his face, just below the cut. “You’ll be okay.”

Sighing, he takes my hand and says, “I hope so.”

Kitty interrupts the moment with a sudden squeak, and then she abandons her lovely fur boots that she was about to pull on and rushes across the room to us, bouncing onto the sofa beside Alexander and saying, in knowing tones, “Somebody had fun.”

I am about to ask Kitty if she has taken up mind-reading in her spare time when Alexander’s hand flies up to his neck and I realise, and I can’t stop myself bursting out laughing. 

“Oh my god, you’ve never let any of your partners do that,” Kitty says, delighting in knowing something embarrassing about someone.

Lavinia and Beanie swarm over to stare, and even I start to teasingly jab at his side, asking annoying questions.

“I… wish that you were all dead?” Alexander says in a questioning tone through breathless laughter, as if unsure of what other threats to deliver.

Priestley opens the door and raises his eyebrow at what can only be described as the kerfuffle that we have created. “Right, children, what are we doing today?” he asks.

“Bullying Alexander,” Lavinia says with a grin.

“Excellent.” He leans against the doorframe and raises his eyebrows. “Well, in case you’ve forgotten, ladies, gentleman, and Lavinia, we have a serial killer on our hands. Chop chop, what are we all doing today?”

“I have an interview with a journalist,” I blurt before I can stop myself.

Priestley frowns at me. “Is that really the best thing, Hazel? The media attention is what led to the thing that poor Alexander is dealing with.”

Beside me, Alexander makes a noise of protest at being called ‘poor’. Then, with a small smile to me, he says, “Honestly, I think she should go for it. The journalist is really clever and comprehensive and she’ll put together a good article that won’t endanger me further, or put Hazel in any notable danger.”

With a slow nod, Priestley says, “Alright, I trust your judgement. Give me her name and articles and I’ll thoroughly vet her before your interview. When is it?”

“Two in the afternoon,” I reply after checking my texts from Daisy.

“I’ll make sure to get that done. Lavinia, can you start that for me?”

Nodding, they reach for their laptop and their wireless headphones, ready to shut out the world and get to work. “On it, sir.”

Satisfied, he turns his attention to Alexander. “Right, Alexander: you aren’t safe, clearly.” This is accompanied by a gesture towards his cheek, as if it isn’t obvious enough already. “We need to thoroughly check those that you have contact with. Who do you regularly talk to other than this crazy lot?”

In unison, Kitty, Beanie, and I all say, “George.”

Alexander sighs and begins to explain. “My… oh. Um— sort-of boyfriend? We aren’t official yet.”

Trying to hide his amusement, Priestley straightens up and says, “Excellent. I’ll see you in my office in fifteen minutes? Try and find some concealer or plasters in that time, please.”

With that, he strides off down the hall towards his office, mindless of our raucous laughter as Alexander presses a hand over the marks on his neck and blushes.

* * *

“Hazel Wong!” Daisy calls, waving a hand as I bustle into the cafe, hair smoothed down into plaits that Kitty insisted upon. “How have you been?”

“Mostly uneventful morning. Two of my co-workers are off to the morgue, and another is helping our boss thoroughly stalk Alexander’s boyfriend.”

Nodding as if that sentence is normal, while others in the cafe stare at us, Daisy sits down and opens her laptop. “He’s the one with the carving, isn’t he?” She taps her cheekbone.

“Yeah. We… aren’t totally sure how it happened but we have an inkling.” As I talk, I take out my phone to look at Priestley’s email. Talking about the crime is all that I can handle right now because looking at Daisy feels dangerous. She is black window pretty with intellect sharp as a samurai sword, and I am never reckless. However, Daisy seems to compel that side of me into the open. I asked her for her number so boldly, and she put it into my phone while we were standing over a corpse. I don’t know what I will say if I lock eyes with her. “We think that he was drugged. Priestley is totally set on it being a drug that acts over a period of a few days before setting him into a deep sleep, which means that he could have been drugged on a crime scene when somebody offered him a drink. He was distracted and blustery and tired the few days before it happened, so that could explain it.”

With another noise of affirmation, Daisy takes a few notes. “Odd to be the one taking notes after our cases.”

I laugh. “It is, isn’t it? You know, I don’t think that Alexander has appreciated the concept of being in serious danger on a case before this.”

“Whereas we got chased by a murderous headmistress,” she says with an almost fond smile. “Ah,  _ schooldays _ . When it was up to my brother and my uncle to take us to interesting places.”

“How is your brother nowadays?” I ask. The last I saw of Daisy’s brother, he was in a rather pitiful state. Two of his friends had just been murdered and his education was in jeopardy, and not a year before that, his best friend killed somebody.

“Married, would you believe it?” she says, rolling her eyes. “The insufferable adult that we despised ten years ago, truly.”

I laugh, trying to think of Daisy’s actual disaster of a brother being a functionally married young man. “That sounds like your fifteen-year-old self’s worst nightmare, Daisy.”

She laughs and says, “I would have hated it. Remember how, at Fallingford, I said that I would show his future fianceé the pictures of him wearing an eyepatch and see how she liked him then? Well, I showed his husband those photos and all he did was smile and laugh.”

“He’s landed someone good, then?” I reply, before looking down at my phone screen. “Oh! Interview?”

“Oh, yes.” With a smile, she looks down at her laptop screen and says, “So, Miss Wong, have you had any witnesses to your cases?”

“One young lady working on the documentary, whom I won’t name for her own safety. She mentioned oddities on set all day, and that she herself had been accused of taking a spear and a sword from the walls as the implements later used in the murder slowly vanished. She gave us our timeframe, which has helped us look into security footage: the murder happened between seven past one and forty past one.”

“But no evidence?”

I shake my head regretfully. “Not even the print of a shoe.”

“We found far too many clues when we were younger, I think. You might be used to them,” Daisy says with a twinkle in her eye. “Earrings…”

“Tea cups,” I reply with a smile, remembering how excited we were by that piece of evidence. “Scraps of a poetry book page.”

“Letter openers and red scarves.”

“Hair clips and broken sticks.”

Together, we say, “A bible.”

The interview is a lost case from that point on, Daisy stopping every now and then to ask me a question that leads us into reminiscing more about our old cases.

When I leave the cafe, my work day is long over and I know that Daisy’s favourite true crime case is the Lizzie Borden case, and my face feels hot at the thought of her long after I have got home and locked the door of my flat, even drawing across the bolt.

With what happened to Alexander, I cannot be too careful. 


	8. i wouldn’t hesitate to smile while you suffocate

Priestley walks into our office with a look on his face that I know very well from my school days: the ‘a child has just done my job for me’ look. “Hazel, Alexander, there’s another.”

Alexander looks up from his phone, trying to pretend that he isn’t talking to George. “Where?”

I reach for my coat. It’s mid-October and the world is bathed in icy rain and pelting sleet that washes away evidence, and we need to get there fast.

“At a school. Some Year Nine girl was the one to call the police, and she rattled off a list of deductions to boot. It’s an English teacher that was murdered.”

I am startlingly reminded of me and Daisy when we were in Third Form, and I chuckle into my hand. “Let’s go. Alexander—”

He pockets his phone with a guilty look. “Sorry. Priestley, is it close enough to drive?”

* * *

Hazel retains a passionate fear of driving herself and hatred for how the Western world follows the rules of the road, and so I drive us to the crime scene. She reads the limited case notes as I drive, relaying the information to me.

“This would be really interesting if it wasn’t a serial killer, you know.”

She raises her eyebrows at me. “ _ What? _ Sorry.”

“No, it’s fine.” I mutter something about dickheads hogging both lanes before saying, “If it wasn’t a serial killer, we would have a field day collecting motives and really investing ourselves in the crime. Instead… we just watch as the victims pile up. This is the sixth murder since late September. They’re more prolific than the Ripper already.”

I know that I sound piteous and melancholy, and Hazel barely reacts other than muttering her condolences.

When we reach the school, I pull into the car park and sort my hair before getting out. “Ready?”

Hazel nods. “Ready.”

The crime scene has been cordoned off by police, and the students chased back inside, but there are curious faces pressed up against every window that overlooks the grounds as we are escorted to the greenery around the edge of the field. I wonder if it is so morbidly fascinating, and then I see it.

I’m forced to press my clenched fist to my lips and determinedly swallow, forcing myself to stare at the body curled up inside the trunk of a hollowed-out tree. “Oh, Christ.”

We walk past the police tape and I make my way over to the body. “Hazel?” I call, and my voice comes out weak and wobbling. “What’s that case? The…”

“Bella in the Wych Elm!” she cries, rushing over with gloves on and another pair clutched in her hands. “Here. I need to…” Clearly following a lead that I haven’t caught onto yet, she walks up to the tree and crouches beside the body. Her hands go up to the woman’s head, fingers careful and eyes hard. She opens the woman’s mouth and draws out, with careful fingers, a navy tie striped with gold and white. The  _ doctor’s _ tie, from what has been so crudely called the Macbeth Murder.

“I’m so sorry…” she whispers as she clutches the tie in one hand, the other hand tracing the woman’s ghoulishly pale face that is taking on a grey quality to her skin. It looks delicate, as if it could break even under a touch as gentle as Hazel’s. As I focus on my friend, unable to look back down at the photos that the police took of the scene before it rained, I watch her shoulders shake and her face contort into open, shaking, raw sobs. “I’m so sorry that I couldn’t save you…”

“Hazel!” I say, and I push the photos into the hands of the nearest officer with an apology, rushing over. I crouch down beside her and put my hands on her shoulders. “Hazel, you need to breathe. You can step away, come on.”

She breaks in this moment, dropping the tie on the slightly damp grass beside the tree and gasping out a sob. “I… they just keep  _ dying _ , Alexander. There’s no leads and they just keep  _ dying _ and I don’t know what to do…”

“Hazel… Hazel…” Unsure what to do, I try to pull her to her feet and she relents, leaning against my chest. I have yet to put on the gloves that she offered me, and so I pull her hair away from her tear-stained face and steady my hands on her shoulders, helpless as she cries.

“It’s just… like… like Miss Bell. In that case, people just kept  _ dying _ .”

“Whatever you need to do, Hazel,” I tell her, running a hand up and down her arm. “Come on. We can abandon this case to the police if you can’t bare to stay here.”

She shakes her head. “I don’t trust them. I trust you.”

With a sigh, I guide her over to the side and turn her away from the body in the tree. The woman’s eyes are hauntingly open, and regard me with pain and fear as I comfort Hazel.

“I need to see Daisy,” she says in firm and decisive tones. “She’s the only person that will understand. She was there. She’s the only person who will understand the… the flashbacks, the nightmares, the…”

“Of course. I’ll call the others right now and they can come and help me. Beanie can drive you there, if you can stand to wait?”

She nods. “Okay. I just… I need to go inside.”

Putting on my most George-like persona, I snap at an officer to package the tie and record the evidence, and I wrap an arm around her shoulders and walk her inside as she fumbles with her phone and mumbles somebody else’s name like a prayer. “Daisy…  _ Daisy _ …”

* * *

Lavinia is the first to join me on the crime scene. “Did you hear?” they greet me. “Analysis came back on the cheek cells because they rushed the call through. Look—”

A file is pressed into my hands. “Oh. The murder happened last night?”

They nod. “Yep. Horrifying, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. They’re willing to leave the body here until tonight, then they’ll take it to the morgue. Breaking procedure, but we need evidence.”

“Sounds reasonable,” Lavinia says, and fixes me with a wicked grin. “Come on, grab some gloves. I didn’t put up with idiotic policemen calling me ‘ma’am’ just to stand around and stare at a corpse.”

There are far more clues on the crime scene than we anticipated, but it leads us around in circles of confusion. Shoes that aren’t hers, which seem to have been stolen from a nearby high-end department store. The shoes that had been on her feet when she was killed are strung up in a high branch of the tree, and all four of us have a go trying to get them. Beanie can’t get past the first branch for fear, Kitty doesn’t want to ruin her hair or her clothes, and I almost fall while dangerously high up.

In the end, it’s Lavinia that manages to grab them. Kitty takes them apart and, with a sterilised knife, cuts open the soles. No notes.

“I was almost hoping for one,” I say, and Kitty raises an eyebrow.

“You are a strange man.” Kitty places the shoe back down on the tarpaulin. “Has George asked you out yet?”

“Crime scene!” Beanie scolds from where she is sketching the print of a very nice shoe that we found beside where she is sitting. “But…” Looking left and right to ensure that nobody is going to scold her for gossip, she whispers, “has he?”

“Beanie Martineau, you traitor!” I say dramatically, and she giggles. “Defend me or don’t!”

She falls back on the tarpaulin and presses her notebook to her face to hide her laughter. “Alex _ ander _ !”

“Well?” Kitty says, and she leans forward. “Has be?”

I look down at my nails, dirt from the tree caked underneath them. “No… but he will.”

“Maybe you should do it!” Beanie says, pulling her long plait over her shoulder and smiling at me. “I think he’d like it! And it would be so  _ romantic _ !”

“He’s a gentleman.” I close my eyes, and I think of roses, and dinners, kisses to the back of my hand and treating me well even as he’s kissing me senseless. He pulled me into a dance under a streetlight and kissed the cuts on my cheek until all I could feel was his lips, and texted me a charming good morning just as I arrived at work. “I’m… quite happy to leave that part up to him.”

Kitty and Beanie make knowing eye contact. “Beanie asked me out within the week, Alexander. You’ve been George at least two.”

“It’s… it’s almost two weeks since we took my number. Two weeks tomorrow.”

“And you danced around each other at school.” Beanie’s eyes are bright as jewels in the cold and overcast light of the day. “You should ask him!”

“I’m not entertaining it,” I reply, though I smile at both of them. “Come on. Crime scene?”

* * *

Daisy makes tea. My head hurts. She presses it into my hands but I can’t grip it.

My head hurts.

“Hazel,” she says, and she crouches down in front of me, taking my hands. “Hazel, it’s alright.  _ You’ll _ be alright.”

When I swallow, I feel it in my ears. I can’t stop seeing the poor woman’s white face in my head, and her wide-open eyes. “It doesn’t feel like it. I feel like I shall never be alright again.”

“You will be.” She squeezes my hands. “Come on. Buck up, Watson.”

I blink, and Daisy is smiling at me. I smile back with effort, and she reaches up to touch my face. “There it is. Right… perhaps we ought to watch something?”

“No.” My boldness startles her as it startles me. “I want… I want… I want to stay like this. Just for a little while.”


	9. i’m pretty glad that you’re alone

“Alexander,” Beanie says, coming up behind me. I’m leaning against a tree and reading through the evidence that the police gathered before we arrived, but my eyes refuse to stay open. “Alexander!”

“I… yes?”

She gives me a disapproving look. “You look like you didn’t sleep a wink.”

“I was… up late last night?” I think of texting George until the early hours, how he complimented me until my knees felt weak and my head spun, and I tried to do the same back because he deserves to know how wonderful I think he is. 

Shifting her feet against the floor, she says, “You need to go and sleep. Go and have a nap in your car or… something. I’m worried about you.”

Her eyes are enormous and worried, and I am astonished at how earnest and genuinely concerned she looks. “Alright. Alright, tell… tell the others, I’ll go and rest for an hour or so.”

I walk across the field towards the car park, rubbing my eyes as I go, and I wonder how I am so tired when I have been drinking coffee all morning. 

* * *

This case is an upsetting knot. I think that it shows in the fact that I am focusing on words to make myself feel  _ better _ , when they usually make me feel mixed up and awful. There is something about the paper that I am holding that sticks out as odd to me and I do not know why, because I never notice things about words. I was hopeless with analysing texts at school and words usually only concern me when somebody is obviously wrong, like when they are written in blood. 

“Kitty,” I say, walking across to her and squaring my shoulders. She is taking the measurements of the body, which has been laid out on the tarpaulin before they come to take it away. “Kitty!”

“Yes, Beans?” she says, and she turns around and smiles. She does look awfully pretty when she does that, but I can’t pay that too much attention when she is beside the poor woman who was killed.

“Where are the files from the last murder? I need to… to check something that’s annoying me.”

With a fond smile, she gestures to her bag, settled beside her coat on the edge of the other tarpaulin mat. “Over there, babe. It’s in my folder behind the pink divider.”

“Thanks!” I rush back across the crime scene and fall to my knees beside Kitty’s bag. There is something that isn’t right.

When I finally fumble the file from its plastic wallet, I lay it out beside the file that I was given this morning. On the piece of paper from today, there is a description, a testimony from a GCSE drama student who had stayed behind to practise her monologue and vaguely seen somebody in the car park, but had put it out of her mind because she thought that it was a teacher getting something from their car or going home.

Then I look at what Amina said about the person that she glimpsed lurking outside on the opposite pavement for a few minutes before the time of the murder, only to vanish when she looked back.

I even use the text-to-speech reader on my phone to make sure that I am not messing anything up, but there is no mistaking it.

_ A dark-skinned figure is all I saw,  _ Amina had said.  _ Nothing else. A hood shielding their face and an umbrella to cover it further and nondescript decent clothes and a coat, but dark hands. _

_ A very pale face and pale hands but I didn’t see any of their features _ , the student had written down for the police that morning.

_ Dark _ and  _ pale _ .

If neither of them have made a mistake, then it can only mean one thing (though I am almost never right). There are two different killers hurting these poor people, and they are competing with each other to see who is best at murder.

It makes me feel quite strange. I call over to Kitty that I’m rushing to the toilet and pull out my phone on the way, calling  _ Amina El Maghrabi _ z

“Miss Martineau?” she greets in surprise. “What can I do for you? I heard about the latest victim — it’s awful!”

“I was wondering,” I gasp out, “if you could relay your testimony again.”

She does, and she does it again, and once more when I ask. I duck into the toilets and continue the call, desperate for confirmation of my theory. I never have theories, not like the others do, and I feel really quite intelligent. She asks what it’s for and I tell her, and she exalts — that’s what Hazel would call it — that I am brilliant and clever and a good detective. I say that she is a good friend and she says something about how we must get coffee sometime, and then she hangs up because her father is calling her to do a piece to camera.

I do not feel such an idiot anymore. 

* * *

When I wake up, I feel barely rested. However, I know that Lavinia would sternly tell me that it’s a trick of the mind and that I will feel wide awake in a moment, and I follow their absent advice, stretching and neatening my clothes before getting out of the car and starting my walk back to the crime scene. 

Beanie approaches me the moment that she notices me, seeming rattled as she bounces up and down. “Are you feeling better?” she asks me earnestly.

Yawning, I rub my eyes. “I’ll feel awake soon, I’m sure.”

“Alexander!” In a panic, she seizes me by my wrist and drags me over to Kitty. “Kitty! Kitty, look!”

She sees me and dramatically sighs, “Alexander! Thank goodness. Come here and help me make a list of what the forensic pathologist needs, before the body is taken to the morgue.”

“No time for that!” Beanie says, waving her hands frantically. “Kitty! Just—” She looks as if she might start crying and I cannot think what has her so upset. I run my hands over my cheeks but there are no new cuts, just the sure feeling of stitches underneath my fingertips.

“Babe, what’s wrong?” Kitty asks, abandoning her writing to rush over to us. “Beans?”

“Alexander, close your eyes!”

I oblige, and Kitty gasps. “Keep them closed,” she murmurs, and then I hear the rustling of fabric and a bright white flash blooms behind my closed lids, with odd dark patches in the centre.

Responding to Beanie nudging my arm, I open my eyes and blink away the blotches from the flash of her camera, turning my gaze to Kitty’s phone screen. Though my vision blurs from the brightness, I can just about make out something.

It hits me like a bullet.

I have twin burns, one on each eyelid, and they are shaped like hearts.

* * *

We call Hazel and I ask how she’s doing. She answers drowsily, tells me that she fell asleep on Daisy’s shoulder and that Daisy braided her hair while she slept. Then she seems to shake off the sleep and say, “What’s wrong?”

“Um… I don’t know how to…” My hands shake and Lavinia snatches the phone.

“The killer’s marked him again,” Lavinia snaps into the phone, their dark mop of hair damp from the drizzle that has just started. “We need you here to discuss.”

She gasps. “I’ll come right now.” There is a bustle in the background and I hear Daisy protesting, saying that Hazel ought to stay.

“Watson, you’re really in no fit state! Come on, you ought to stay here.”

For what is probably the first time in her life, Hazel ignores her. Barely half an hour later, she is rushing across the field and to the crime scene, still carrying the thermos flask of coffee that she filled up that morning from the offered police refreshments. “Alexander!” she cries, rushing towards me and taking my face in her hands. “Oh, Alexander…”

I close my eyes and she is still staring in helpless horror when I open them again. “This is awful.”

“I know.” Everybody seems more upset than me; I can only feel numb, too terrified to even let the emotion overtake me. It will doubtless overcome me later tonight, when I am curled against George’s shoulder and sobbing while he holds me. Right now, as an invisible killer cuts me up with compliments, he is my only refuge.

In a whirlwind of worry, Hazel flies around the crime scene, filling herself in on what she has missed. She raises an eyebrow at Beanie when she says that she has nothing, no ideas, “Honestly Hazel!” and I think that Beanie might have a thought that she is too anxious to voice.

Just as I am wondering whether not not Kitty will be able to get it out of her, Hazel appears at my side again. “Alexander, do you also feel… tired? Because I was asleep for ages but I honestly feel like I could fall asleep at any second and—”

Just as I have the horrifying thought that we might have both been drugged by the same coffee, Hazel sways on her feet and falls into my arms without another word.


	10. it’s wrong but i want you tonight

We have hardly had a chance to discuss anything. Hazel spends a day in hospital having drugs flushed from her system and, judging by what is found in my half-empty thermos flask, the coffee served at the scene was to blame. That day at the office is quiet. Beanie is thoughtful and tearfully upset, Kitty pensively quiet, and Lavinia furious at everything. Every time I walk past a mirror, I catch sight of the stitches on my cheek and the burns on my eyelids and I want to vomit.

George invites me to his flat again, and I agree because I need  _ something  _ that is not my work. I try to make myself look decent and presentable but I cannot stand in front of the mirror without seeing the cut on my cheek and wanting to frantically scratch out all of the stitches.

When I arrive at George’s front door, there is blood underneath my nails and the clotted blood around the healing scores in my skin is all picked away. “Alex!” George says when he opens the door, tucking his arms around me and burying his face in my shoulder. “Oh— Alex, your cheek.”

“Please. Not now.”

His look is disapproving. “At least let me clean it for you, sweetheart.”

I relent with a nod and he leads me into the bathroom. It’s all utterly unassuming, and I sit up on the counter and survey the scene and he cleans my cheek and washes the blood from under my nails. As he does, he talks me through the lectures that he had today. “A young man that I sit next to mixed up some of the easiest terms that I have ever heard in law,” he tells me, and I laugh as he explains that he has known the aforementioned words and their definitions for at least five years. “Come on, I’m done. What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know.” I rub my eyes. “I shouldn’t have agreed to this, I’m just down and upset and I’ll ruin your evening.”

“Nonsense.” He helps me down from the countertop and leads me into the living area, sitting down on the sofa and pulling me down beside him. “We can stay like this, if you want.”

Humming, I lean against his shoulder. “I’d like that. Being with you… it clears my head.”

After a moment of silence, he nudges me and my head ends up in his lap, and he combs a hand through my hair. “I’m glad,” he murmurs. “Here, I’ll put something on. Murder?”

“As long as it’s fictional.”

* * *

I am sitting propped up in bed, leaning back on many cushions with my laptop on my lap. It has been two days since my stint in hospital and yet I still feel rather floppy and useless. Another long sleep should have me back to normal, and I am just about to take Lavinia’s advice —  _ sleep, you stubborn fuck _ , their text message said — when Alexander sends me a message.

_ I’m about to call you, just a heads up. _

I answer the call from  _ Partner in Crime _ and Alexander greets me with, “Cheery news from the morgue.”

“Oh?”

“The funeral directors found something on the body of the fourth victim — the Macbeth murder — that we didn’t catch.”

He sounds rather sickened and I am almost afraid to ask, “What was it?”

“The missing pin badge, the one that hasn’t turned up yet. Remember how we thought it was odd that none of the stolen things were left on his body, unlike the first victim? Well, they were trying to do something with the gold of his teeth, and they found the pin badge.” Taking a deep breath, he says, “It was stabbed through the uvula — the dangly thing in the back of his throat.”

I groan and bury my face in my hands. “Oh my god, of course it was.”

We stay on the phone until I go to sleep, Alexander talking about his impromptu date with George as I chip in with mumbles and affirmations, and when I check the call log the following morning on the Underground as I go to work, I realise that he didn’t hang up until he was sure that I was asleep.

* * *

“Well, that’s absolutely horrifying.”

Alexander and I are standing in front of the body of the university’s treasurer, Archibald Spencer, propped up in his desk chair and naked from the waist up, some disturbing sewing patterned across his chest: MAKE HIM YOUR BOY, DARLING.

It is half-past one and we are standing in the university that George Mukherjee attends, detecting the murder of another poor victim of our modern Jack the Ripper.

Standing off to the side, giving his statement to Kitty, is George Mukherjee. Twenty minutes ago, he happened upon the corpse of the university’s treasurer while seeking out confirmation of a moved lecture date. “It was about twenty-five to one,” I hear him saying. “I had just got out of my lecture at half past and it takes around five minutes to walk to this office.”

“Did you see anything of note?” Kitty asks, tapping out no-nonsense notes on her work phone. I hear the click of her freshly-manicured nails against the screen, a sound that I have become used to.

“No, which is the oddest thing. Pardon my interrupting but…” Turning away from her, he walks towards me and Alexander, a hand brought up in front of his face to cover his mouth.

I can’t imagine how he feels when faced this sight, not as accustomed to bodies and we are. Not accustomed at all.

“I studied criminology for years and the only thing that I can think is… this would take so long, this sewing.” He stands further back from the desk than us, and Alexander instinctively draws closer to him. When George notices, he glances up at Alexander and flashes him a kind, confident smile. “The murderer couldn’t have finished long before I arrived. Mister Spencer took a class this morning, you see, and he would have only been alone for an hour or so. That sewing, it would take some work.”

“Have you ever written on somebody’s skin with a weird coarse thread? Sounds like you have some experience,” Kitty teases, hovering a little way away and perfecting her notes.

“Not with thread,” he jokes back, leaning over the desk to survey the body before blancing and rearing back. It is as if the situation has suddenly hit him with full force, the shock lodged in his throat melted away and letting the emotions flood through him. Alexander reaches over to steady him with a hand on his back. “I’m… I’m going to go outside, to pray.”

“Take all the time you need, okay? I know it’s a shock,” Alexander instructs, eyes warm and worried.

I look closer, trying to find what is irking me so much. “Do you have the same feeling, Alexander? That they’ve... the killer has broken a pattern, only we don’t know what the pattern was. It’s like they’ve… shown us a negative, a negative so that we could see the positive.”

“I think I know,” Kitty says, putting down her phone on the desk — “Crime scene!” I scold — and looking at the sewing on the chest. “Look, it’s not a thread at all.”

“It’s  _ hair _ ,” I whisper, horrified. “The hair from the… the doctor, the Macbeth murder.”

They’ve broken a pattern, they have!” Alexander crows. “The first three murders, three things were taken from the first body, as well as a body part. One thing was left on that body — the necklace pendant — the teeth were left on the second victim, the shoelace on the third, and the killer kept the watch.”

I nod in understanding, feeling as if a light has come on in my brain. “The fourth victim had that too! Three things were taken from him, and a body part. The pin badge was found on him, the stethoscope in the Wound Man murder, and the taffeta in the… the teacher in the tree, in her mouth. This murder, it should have been the restart, four things being taken. But it isn’t. They’ve used the hair instead of keeping it as they did with the watch.”

“Does that mean that our killer of becoming erratic, sending a sign?” Alexander asks. He is looking at the body with an almost reverent fascination, and I go to ask why when I realise: he is no stranger to letters marked into skin anymore. There is no reason for him to be disgusted.

“I don’t know,” I reply.

George comes back into the room, rather pale but his jaw stoically set. Grateful for the distraction, Alexander rushes over. Sighing, I turn to Kitty. “If our killer is becoming erratic, they might have left some DNA evidence. They’re becoming careless. Call the forensic experts and isolate the area, and somebody get me a mask and some gloves.”

I feel like Daisy taking control of a crime scene, and it feels good to have back some of the control that I lost when I was retching up my stomach contents in the hospital because somebody drugged me. That was the most terrifying experience of my life and I have faced down killers face to face, and I will fight to stop this killer hurting anybody else.

I am unsure how far I will go.

* * *

“Forensics!” Kitty shouts when the door opens. “We need to analyse this coffee cup and take DNA scrapings from the back of his chair and this drawer handle and—” She stops in alarm. “You’re not forensics.”

“No,” says Daisy Wells, a notepad in hand and her eyes glittering at me from across the room. She wears a fashionable pocket watch in the pocket of her smart pinstripe trousers and a ruffled white blouse, and she looks like the sort of person who would usually make me lose my breath. “I was conducting an interview across the university — about gentrification, Hazel and I were texting about my article last night — and when I heard that this had happened, I had to see for myself.”

Kitty mouths something at me from across the room with wide eyes. I make it out to be,  _ Is she a serial killer? Who volunteers to see a corpse when they don't have to? _

“Daisy’s been like this all her life,” I say, waking across the enormous office to meet her at the door. “It’s in her nature to be fascinated, especially as she hasn’t had a proper murder mystery case since we were at school together. She’s starved for excitement.”

Unimpressed, Daisy raises a judgemental eyebrow at me.

“You’re going to be a step above all of your competitors with this article,” I tell her, trying to mask how frightened I really am. I know that my voice is tremoring. “You’re right on the scene!"

“A depressing half an hour too late,” she says with a sigh, accepting the mask that Kitty offers her, still accompanied by a mildly frightened and bemused look. When she catches sight of the body, she draws in a breath and spots of colour appear high up on her cheeks. “ _ Fu-uck _ , that’s quite something.”

I glance away from the body. George is standing at the side with Alexander, running a hand over Alexander’s stitches and talking to him to calm him. Their free hands are clasped, and it feels like an invasion to look at them. However, I hold my stare just long enough to catch George’s reaction when he sees Daisy: his eyes grow wide and his expression incensed. “Wells!” he barks.

“George. How lovely to see you.”

The air in the room almost grows colder under the intensity of their eye contact. Alexander coughs. “Crime scene?”

Unfortunately, Kitty’s statement is much louder and it catches their attention. “You two know each other?”

“One could say. We had a… somewhat unpleasant first meeting.” George picked non-existent lint from his jacket sleeve.

Scowling, Daisy retorts, “Because  _ that’s _ how you would describe the bloody surprise engagement.”

“It isn’t my fault they fell in love!”

Daisy’s glare is chilling and I am glad that I’m not on the receiving end. “You gave him your blessing!”

“I didn’t think that he’d actually propose!”

Something clicks inside my head. “Is this about your brother?”

“Hm,” she hums, raising her eyebrows meaningfully. I am delighted to realise that I still know the meaning of that particular look: there is more to the story than what she is willing to tell. “George gave my brother his blessing and forced me into the insufferable nightmare of fielding my brother from our family and their opinions.”

“Why would George…”

_ “Daisy, Hazel, meet one of my dearest friends, Harold Mukherjee.” _

I snort with barely-constrained amusement. “Oh.  _ Oh _ . I can’t believe that you didn’t see that pairing coming sooner, quite frankly. It was damn obvious that Christmas.”

“Crime scene,” Alexander says forcefully as Daisy makes an offended noise. “We can’t have this damn… lettering happening to anybody else.”

“Do you know why it was?” Daisy asks, turning away from George. “Romantic scandal?”

“Got it in one,” I tell her, fixating on her to avoid looking back at the corpse leant back in the chair. “He was carrying on with his assistant behind his wife’s back. This killer has a healthy dose of disapproval for those who do bad things. It’s like if Robin Hood was a murderous assassin.”

Raising an eyebrow, she asks, “How did you know that he was having an affair? It’s been all of half an hour.”

“There was an email to his assistant open on his computer when I found him,” George says. “And it was pretty much an open secret. You could figure it out if you had eyes.”

Daisy and George stared at the body, shoulder-to-shoulder in fascination and horror. I cannot imagine the horror that George is feeling, so close to death for the very first time. Perhaps that is a good thing, for that feeling is wrenching and awful and directed right through your heart. To him, it must feel like the writing is meant for him, working its way up his fingers and settling in his mind.

Just like the word PRETTY has done for Alexander.


	11. you’re wanted coast to coast

Amina is sitting in our break room with a mug of tea and a smile on her face as if it is perfectly normal for her to be here. She is chatting to Lavinia, who is sat on the counter with their headphones around their neck and a scowl on their face.

When we walk in, Amina says, “Kitty, Beanie!” and bounds to her feet. “How are you?”

“Great!” Kitty smiles at me and squeezes my hand. “Beans and I started another book last night.”

“Aw, you read together? That’s cute!”

I feel myself go very hot and embarrassed, and say, “I have trouble with words, so Kitty reads to me.”

Her glow doesn’t dull one bit. “That’s even sweeter!”

Relaxing with a breath, Kitty kisses my cheek before turning to Lavinia. “I finally finished the next season of Killing Eve, Lavinia! And I have _thoughts_!”

“Finally!” they say, rolling their eyes in an exaggerated way. “Right, grab a coffee, lets yell.”

I sit down beside Amina. “Hi. How are you?” I ask her.

“Good! I almost missed a prayer yesterday but my life’s been pretty boring other than that. What about you?” She sits forward and lowers her voice to a whisper. “You had that theory, didn’t you? You rang me about it on Friday!”

“Oh, yes! Did you read about the murder yesterday?”

“I did!” Amina says. “It was awful, I felt sick just reading the article. Did it advance your theory at all? At least some good will have come of it then.”

I nod. “Everybody thinks that it was a dig at the man’s romantic associations but I don’t think that our killer does.... research? I think that they just murder people, you know?” It feels odd to talk about murder in the very objective way that Lavinia does, when usually I get upset because that is a whole person who has died. I feel braver. “I think that it might have been one killer teasing the other, or threatening them. I can’'t think what about, but maybe it’s some weird threat that they’re going to murder the other murderer’s significant other.”

“That sounds plausible!” Amina enthuses, nodding. “Are you going to tell your boss about it, or Hazel?”

Though I am uncertain, I shake my head. “I want some more evidence before I do that, you know? Otherwise, it feels a bit... jumping to conclusions-y, you know?”

Amina nods. “That’s understandable. So, do you think—”

The door to the break room bursts open and Hazel and Alexander rush inside, Alexander swearing and blushing while Hazel laughs. “Nothing happened, Hazel, shut up!” he complains, and Kitty lights up from where she is sitting on the counter. Even though she is about to go and grill Alexander for the latest gossip, I find that she still looks rather pretty like that.

“Tell us _everything_ , what happened?”

We have a group chat, the five of us, and so we all witnessed Alexander’s elation and panic when he invited George to spend the night at his flat on a whim. Amina looks rather confused and I tap her on the arm, leaning over to show her the frantic mess that was our group chat last night.

mothers and fuckers (and beanie)   
  
Alexander   
i have made a drastic mistake, fucken kill me /hyp   
  
Kitty ❤️🐱   
what did you do??   
  
Lavinia   
i’ll get the shovels /j   
  
Alexander   
lmao no it’s about George   
  
Hazel   
Ohhhh I know what this is   
  
Did you finally ask him out?   
Alexander   
you’re all menaces and plagues /s   
  
Kitty ❤️🐱   
love you too, alex   
  
Hazel   
I watched this happen over his shoulder - he invited George to stay at his flat overnight   
  
Lavinia   
HA oml you actually made a move wonders will never cease   
  
Kitty ❤️🐱   
use protection 😏   
  
Who are you and what have you done with Alexander?   
  
Alexander   
i’m not THAT bad!   
  
Hazel   
I hate to break it to you but yes, you are.   
  


Amina laughs. “Now I know how you’re all as clever as you are: you use all of your brain cells to detect and then that happens.”

“Nothing happened!” Alexander is protesting, waving his hands at Kitty as she pesters and prods at the new marks on his neck. “We ate out — Lavinia, don’t make the obvious joke, we watched a film, we… kissed, we went to sleep.”

Astonishingly, as I had thought her too polite to do so, Amina rushes to add to the teasing. “You’re _such_ a prude! Well, you’re acting like one; those marks suggest otherwise.”

He pinches the bridge of his nose and says, “Like anybody would want to screw someone with _this face_.” To accompany this, he points to his cheek.

“Well, a serial killer clearly does,” Lavinia says. I try to give them my most disapproving look because it was a rather insensitive thing to say, and they throw up their hands with an incredulous, “What?! Maybe the killer just thinks that Alexander is hot and wants to screw him!”

“ _Lavinia_ ,” Hazel says in a disappointed tone. She also sounds slightly surprised, which she shouldn’t.

With a contemplative look on their face, they say, “Actually, if it was just that, they’d have carved a dick or something. They’re clearly in love with him!”

Alexander sits down heavily, resting his head in his hands and his shoulders shaking with laughter, “I hate that they’re right.”

“What about ‘I want to fuck you’? Fuck spelt F-U-C, of course,” Kitty suggests, tossing her hair back over her shoulder and twinkling up at him mischievously. “That would get the message across.”

Lavinia regards Alexander in the way that Hazel looks at evidence, and says, “I don’t know if that would _fit_?”

Writing in the air with her hand, Amina suggests, “What about just ‘fuck’ with a question mark at the end?”

“ _Jesus Christ_ ,” Alexander manages through his laughter. “I fucking hate you guys.”

“We’re trying to understand the psyche of the Ripper!” Lavinia replies, barely concealing their grin.

“We’re actually calling it the Ripper now, are we?” Hazel asks, sitting down in her usual seat on the very end of the sofa beside Alexander, leaning up against the arm and propping her feet up on the coffee table, grinning at him. “Jolly good, carry on.”

“What if it was done like one of those pieces of paper that all the pretty popular girls would get passed in primary school?” Everybody is staring at me with intrigue as I talk, except Alexander (who still has his face buried in his hands), but I ignore them before I lose my nerve. I look at Alexander instead, leaning over to see the right side of his face. “That would fit, I think! ‘Do you like me?’ and then ‘yes’ and ‘no’ with two boxes.”

“Imagine if Alexander just, like, got a pen and ticked the ‘no’ box,” Hazel says, giggling giddily with a hand over her mouth. I don’t think that she likes people seeing her teeth when she laughs — she has no reason to be self-conscious, because she’s very pretty, but she is. “What would happen?”

“I’d be skinned,” he says, sounding like he’s talking through treacle because of his laughter. “or beheaded.”

“Or both!” Amina adds, throwing out her hands and speaking cheerily. “They’re not mutually exclusive!”

“Would skinning a severed head be like peeling an orange?” Lavinia wonders aloud, and Hazel makes a disgusted noise.

“You shouldn’t be allowed to talk,” I tell them with as much joking seriousness as I can put into my voice.

Sitting forward and resting her elbows on her knees, Amina’s eyes twinkle rather dangerously. “No, I’m curious now. Wouldn’t it be like peeling a peach? They are… furry, and it’s thin, like actual skin.”

“But oranges are what they use in those weird life hack videos to test foundations,” Kitty argues, and I remember the time that she decided to take the advice in one of those videos and looked like a rather strange ghoul.

As a believer in the scientific method, and finally complicit in their idiocy, Hazel says, “You know how some fruits have freaky weird genetics and grow to be really massive? We should get a giant peach, and a giant orange, and test it.”

“But we wouldn’t know unless we had a head to peel to compare it against,” I say, slightly confused but trying to make a joke, and there is a scattered muttering of ‘good point’. 

“Alexander, do you want to volunteer?” Kitty asks brightly, and we all burst out laughing.

Wiping tears of laughter from his eyes, Alexander chuckles, “And here I was thinking that nothing could ruin peaches for me more than _Call Me By Your Name_.”

Hazel and Kitty are in the middle of questioning the fact that _Call Me By Your Name_ is a really weird title when Amina gasps, “ _Ya Allah!_ ”

“What is it?” I say, and then I follow her gaze to the back of Alexander’s hands and say, “Oh my god.”

The backs of Alexander’s hands are covered in blood. I glance up again and watery blood is pouring down his face, and his eyes are faintly coloured red and wide with horror. “Fucking Christ.”

With a glassy look of shock on her face, Hazel passes Alexander a tissue and Kitty dives for her makeup wipes. His hands shaking, Alexander wipes the blood from his hands and his face and holds the tissue underneath his eyes, not saying a word.

“I’ll get Priestley!” I say, and I rush out of the room and down the hall to Priestley’s office.

I pause outside the ajar door, because he’s on the phone. The person on the other end is rushed and tearful and Priestley’s face is drawn with worry as he reassures them. “Get yourself to a doctor as soon as possible, Mister Mukherjee,” he says sternly, and an idea slowly creeps into my head as he feeds orders down the phone. The killer must have hurt Alexander during the night, done something to make him _cry blood_ , because George is injured too. “Of course, I’ll inform him and get him to the hospital as soon as possible. Thank you so much for calling me about this. Let me know how you get on, what the damage is. Thank you, Mister Mukherjee. Goodbye for now.”

When he sets down his phone, he sees me at his office door and starts. “Ah— Rebecca!” He still doesn’t call me Beanie, given that he is so much older than me and rather like a guardian. “What is it?”

“Um—” Before I can lose my nerve, I babble out, “Alexander’s crying blood!”

He does not look as surprised as he should, and I think that it must be the injury that George just informed him of. With a deep sigh, he says, “Of course he is.”

* * *

Priestley pulls me into his office and brings more bad news instead of reassurances. “I’ve just received a phone call for your boyfriend, Alexander,” he says, sounding grave. “He discovered something rather unpleasant when he became tearful over a case that he was writing a defense for: he is in the same situation as you.”

“Not George!” I say, and it comes out between a gasp and a groan. It’s all I can do to bury my head in my hands and squeeze my eyes shut to quell the tears threatening to spill over. “Oh, Christ. I was hoping to keep him safe from this killer.”

He reaches over his desk and puts a hand on my shoulder. “I’m so sorry, Alexander. If there’s anything that I can do…”

“Thank you, sir.” I rub my eyes and swear when I see the blood on my hands.

With a regretful look in his eyes, he passes me a tissue and, when I have cleaned my skin, a card. “Excuse the unprofessional nature of this gesture, Alexander, but this case must be hard on you.”

I turn it over and see the word ‘therapist’, and have to resist the urge to either sigh at the suggestion or laugh at the awkwardness of it all. “Thank you, sir.”

* * *

“Priestley thinks that I need a therapist,” Alexander says, walking into our office and falling back into his chair. 

“You do,” I say, without looking up from my latest email from Daisy. She has linked me to the final draft of her article, asking me what I think of it. _Even though I am sure that it’s absolutely perfect,_ she wrote, _I trust your suggestions._ I had to laugh because it was so utterly Daisy-ish. 

Sarcastically, he says, “Thanks, Hazel. I appreciate your support.” When I look up, his eyes are sparkling with mirth and I am glad that he can find humour in something after the unpleasant shock of earlier today. “Priestley gave me this business card.”

I take it and check it over, and it seems utterly and boringly ordinary. However, it is a therapist, and so I say, “Check his freezer for bodies, when you meet him.”

Laughing, Alexander says, “Please, he’s apparently twice my age. I don’t think I’ll develop a Hannibal and Will tension with this…” He pauses to check the name on the card. “Felix Mountfitchet. He sounds like a solicitor, or a Hobbit. Plus, I highly doubt that the killer is anybody I know.”

With that charming assessment of the etymology of the therapist’s name, Alexander switches on his monitor. I turn my attention back to Daisy’s article, laughing at Alexander’s grumpy face.


	12. it’s in the gutter, where i left my lover

I’m not sure if I’m going to this appointment to please Priestley, George, or myself.

At any rate, I am compelled by this therapist enough to brave taking the Tube during the London evening rush. Since somebody from the documentary crew caught a clear photo of the cut on my cheek, through a window of the house when I was leaning up against an outside railing to call George, the same picture has been decorating every sensational account of the crimes, suggesting that I am conspiring with the murderer.

It feels like an odd sort of defiance, walking through Waterloo station with ‘PRETTY’ emblazoned on my face so boldly and decorated by stitches, as if I am letting this horrid killer know that I do not care what they have done to me, that the cut on my face is not for them alone.

As I rush through the station to the Northern Line, a news article emblazoned on the front of  _ The Guardian  _ catches my eye.

_ History Written In Blood _ is the title of the article, written by one Daisy Wells. Rather nicely, it is missing the tried and true photo of my cheek: instead, it has a photo of me and Hazel on the first crime scene, crouched over the note with my arm around her shoulders protectively. I pay at the stand for the paper and fold it up, putting it into my bag. Even though I am absolutely desperately excited to read it, I do not fancy all the stares that I would get on the Tube for that.

_ Partner In Crime _ appears on the screen on my phone, and I grin. Even though it likely brings yet more bad news, I cannot help but be far more excited than necessary every time I talk to Hazel: it is great to have somebody to staunchly on my side. “Hazel!” I say with a grin. “Don’t say it’s another crime, I don’t think that Priestley would be happy.”

“He’s going to microchip both of us at this rate,” she says with a laugh. “No, I need your advice.”

Shouldering past some gossiping tourists and onto the escalator, I put as much mock-dread in my voice as possible and say, “Oh no, do I need to help bury a body?”

Hazel laughs. “Alexander! No, um… Daisy Wells has sort of… invited me to her flat? She wants to celebrate the fact that her article was published, considering that I helped her so much.”

“That’s great!” I reply honestly. Hazel has been so very nervous about Daisy and it’s great to see her gaining some of her usual feisty confidence. “What are you worried about?”

“I kinda… sorta…” I hear her sigh and the heave of springs, and I know that she has thrown herself back on her bed. “I think that I  _ might _ have a really tiny crush on her. So I’m overthinking it.”

After a moment of being dumbfounded — I have always considered Hazel competent in matters of romance, though I suppose that everybody looks that when put next to me — I reply, “Hazel, why are you asking  _ me _ for advice? I’m useless at romance.”

“You’ve got a hot boyfriend!” she blurts irritably, and then lets out a muffled noise of embarrassment. “I mean—”

I snort. “Hazel Wong, you deviant!”

After a jokingly angry pause, she says, “Alexander, I’ve never flirted with anyone!”

“You flirted with me.”

“We were eighteen and you already fancied me, that’s different,” she says, a pointed reminder of my persistent and probably quite irritating affections. “And you’re also very much not Daisy Wells.”

“True,” I concede, and Hazel’s reply crackles as I step off the escalator. “Sorry, Hazel. I’m taking the Nothern Line to this therapy appointment and there’s no service.”

“It’s alright! I’ll… let you know how… text you!” she replies exaggeratedly blowing a kiss before my lack of service severs the connection. With a laugh, I send her ‘keep my updated’ with several side-eye emojis, and try to remember which station I need to change at.

* * *

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Alexander,” says Felix Mountfitchet, shaking my hand as I sit down in the chair opposite him.

“You too, Mister Mountfitchet,” I reply with a smile.

He leans back, crossing his legs — I notice that he’s wearing expensive loafers. “Where should we start, Mister Arcady?”

With a gesture to my cheek, I say, “Maybe this?”

He raises his eyebrow at me, and I know that I shouldn’t take therapy as a challenge, but Felix Mountfitchet makes it hard not so. Trying to let my guard down, I pick at the leather chipping off the armchair, and try to tell him as little about myself as possible.

* * *

“Hazel!” Daisy greets me, and it feels like my first time stepping into her apartment despite the fact that I have been here before, because I am not in the middle of a flashback, traumatised, or drugged from the coffee on a crime scene. “Did you see the article?”

Her eyes are lit up like beacons of beautiful blue, and I nod to match her excitement, pulling her into a hug. “I did! It was wonderful, your writing is very eloquent.”

“I am a good writer when I’m not pretending to be pretty with no thoughts in my head at all,” she replies, an enormous bright look on her face, her grin wide and her cheeks flushed. “Oh, isn’t it wonderful? The front page of  _ The Guardian _ , Watson!”

Suddenly, I know exactly what to do. “I brought wine for the occasion. It’s a bunbreak for adults.”

Daisy looks at me for a moment, her eyes very wide, and I worry that I’ve made some sort of mistake, misjudged the situation. Then she bursts out laughing. “Hazel Wong, you are  _ fantastic _ ,” she says on a breath of happiness, and then she grabs me by my wrist and tugs me towards the sitting room. It’s rather crowded with newspapers, but she sweeps a pile of reference papers from the sofa and onto the coffee table, and I sit down beside her, careful to sit on the edge and steady my breathing and not dangle my feet over the dangerous precipice that is allowing myself to believe that  _ she _ might feel something for  _ me _ . Daisy fetches two wine glasses and puts them down, and then flops down beside me heavily, kicking off her heels and resting her feet, still clad in her tights, on the coffee table. She is wearing smart trousers and a beautiful blouse, and her blazer is slung over the back of the armchair. It looks as if she had hardly got home before I arrived.

“How was your day, Hazel Wong?” she asks, uncorking the bottle and laughing when I stifle a shriek of surprise at the pop. “Eventful?”

“Nothing compared to yesterday!” I reply, letting out a breath and leaning back against the sofa, accepting the glass when she presses it into my hand. “I’ve been waiting to tell you, I know that you’re a fan of gore.”

Her eyes practically sparkle and she is still giddy with excitement when she sits back with her own glass. “Ooh? Go on!”

“Alexander started crying  _ blood _ yesterday morning. The others making ridiculous jokes about the cut on his cheek and the idea of, um,  _ peeling _ a human, and it brought him to giggly tears. That was when we realised.” I close my eyes, picturing the blood smeared down his cheeks and covering the backs of his hands. “Then Priestley got a call from George, Alexander’s not-boyfriend, who stayed over at Alexander’s the night before, and  _ he _ was crying blood too. The hospital said it was a rupture in his tear duct, and that there’s nothing for them to do but to wait for it to heal.”

Daisy is fixed on me, incredibly focused. Her face is rather pale, with two spots of colour high up on her cheeks, and I know that look all too well: fascination. “Oh my goodness,” she murmurs. “How awful, that’s a perfect crime. How were they not caught?”

I shrug. “I have no idea, but we’re working on our theories now. It seems that Beanie, one of our researchers, has some theory that she’s trying to hide. It’s not working; we all know that she has a theory, but not what it is.” I think of how shifting and odd Beanie has been, and Kitty’s confused messages about how she’s been behaving.

She chuckles. “She sounds so innocent and kind.” With that, she reaches for the remote and turns on the television.

We watch for a while, the headlines scrolling past on the news as we sip our wine and critique the coverage of the murders, taking turns to point out flaws. Daisy is significantly more critical than I am, I notice.

Then, just when Daisy declares it all useless and reaches to change the channel, the newscaster says something that makes us both perk us. “An article written by emerging crime journalist Daisy Wells has shot to national acclaim: she talks about the murders in detail and displays an astounding inside knowledge of the system of private detecting, and the questions that she asked in her interview with Hazel wong are insightful and out-of-the-box, offering the public a new perspective on the murders and assuaging the terror across London.” She holds up a copy of the newspaper emblazoned with Daisy’s article,  _ History Written In Blood _ , and continues with a smile on her face. “In fact, the London Chief of Police who was assigned the case and relinquished control of it to the private detectives that the university called in has said that Daisy Wells could ‘have me out of a job if she put her mind to it’.”

Daisy has gone very still and thoughtful, and it looks as if she may burst with excitement, practically vibrating next to me. When the topic finally changes, after several long minutes of discussing her article in excruciating detail and nobody having a bad word to say about it, she lets out an enormous breath. “Oh, isn’t it all so wonderful, Hazel?” she sighs happily, and when I turn to her, her face is much closer to mine than I had anticipated.

“Ah— Daisy…” I breathe quite helplessly, my hands clasping my glass like a lifeline as my breath fails to draw in as deeply as I want it to. With careful and nimble fingers, she takes the glass from my hands and sets it on the coffee table beside her own, and then she comes back to me, leaning in even closer.

“Daisy…” She glances down at my lips, and I am suddenly so tired of  _ waiting _ . I lean forward and press my lips to hers, and she kisses me back with only the barest hint of hesitation.


	13. eyes blue and hollow

“Are we not allowed, like, twenty-four hours to compartmentalise anything?”

The question comes as we are standing around a corpse at eight-thirty in the morning, pointedly trying not to look at the empty eye sockets and catching each other’s concerned and frightened gazes as we do so.

We found out about this murder along with the rest of the country, watching the morning news in the break room and debating over whether or not Alexander’s therapist is an alien. The newscaster calmly handed over to a crime reporter standing calmly in a secluded park, ready to reassure the public of what the newscasters had been saying for the past ten minutes: that the newly-emerging Reaper is nothing to worry about, that everybody is safe and the case is under control.

However, the camera cut to quite a different scene: it was angled towards the ground and zoomed in on the face of the dead reporter, his empty eye sockets staring hauntingly out of the screen.

The horrified silence was broken by Lavinia yelling, “FUCK!” and then we were on our feet in an instant, scrambling to call forensic teams and put our shoes on. As we left the offices, rushing into separate cars, I watched Alexander spread a plaster over the cut on his cheek and tuck a scarf around his neck, dipping his face into it so that only his eyes just barely peered out.

* * *

After her frustrated comment, Hazel pulls on a pair of gloves and glances over at the file that I’m holding: an enlarged picture of the reporter from when he had spoken on the news an hour before his second slot, the last time that he was seen alive. The drugged cameraman was taken away in an ambulance before we arrived but it can be safely assumed that he isn’t the killer: he doesn’t fit either description, with terracotta skin and brown curls, and there are no body parts to be found in his belongings.

“Right,” she says, taking a deep breath and steadying herself, “let’s get to it.” Even though I can see her bearing up, she doesn’t show it in her voice: she holds herself tall and issues orders. “Alexander, Beanie, and Lavinia, you check the area around here, try and recreate what could have happened and in what order. What angle the killer came from, how long the murder would have taken, who may have seen them and from where.”

“Will Graham style?” Alexander teases, and Hazel rolls her eyes.

“Whatever suits you, Alexander.”

Hazel’s thought process isn’t clear for a moment, but I soon work it out: Beanie is squeamish, Alexander is traumatised, and Lavinia can make sure that they both do work.

“Come on then, Holmes, let’s get to it.”

She sighs and looks away, a small smile on her face. “I’m the Watson, not the Holmes.”

With that, we crouch down beside the body. “If it follows the pattern,” I say, trying to look at the face without really taking it in, “then we know what the stolen body part is.”

“The buttons of his shirt are gone,” Hazel says, carefully unbuttoning the man’s blazer to look at the exit wound. The victim was stabbed in the heart from behind, with a blade long enough to leave his body on the other side. The idea makes Beanie sick, and I regret encouraging her to take a course in fieldwork. “That doesn’t fill me with confidence.”

“No, me neither.” I look up and down his body and then I realise something. “His microphone. Hazel, where’s his microphone? It should be clipped onto his collar.”

We look at each other in alarm, and then Hazel reaches around the body with an expression of mild disgust and unclips the microphone pack from the back of his trousers. “The wire’s been cut,” she says, running a finger over the frayed end. “With a bloody knife, too.”

I reach for some gloves and pull them on. They’re uncomfortable, and I remember why I prefer the research side of this job. With an expression of sour sickness, Hazel presses the microphone pack into my hands. “There you go. Right… what else is missing?”

I set about preserving it in an evidence bag while Hazel compares the corpse to the photograph. After a long moment, she gasps. “Kitty! I know the last thing that was taken!”

Turning back to the body, I realise. “His pocket square, of course!” She gives me a quizzical look and I elaborate. “His tie looks out of place in the rest of his outfit, it had to match  _ something _ .”

“Of course.” With a slight chuckle in her voice, Hazel stands up and stares down at the body. “God, I cannot bear looking at that.”

“HAZEL, KITTY!” Lavinia yells, and I turn to see them frantically waving us over. Alexander is holding a blood-soaked machete, staring at it with a mixture of fascination and horror.

“It was stowed behind the tree,” Beanie tells me when I rush over, leaving Hazel and Lavinia by the body. “Alexander, show her.”

He offers it out and I take it. “Impressive, isn’t it?” he says with a grin, and I am glad to see some of the detective enthusiasm back in his eyes. “This thing is an antique, it’s quite wicked. Actually… you remember that wonderfully fascinating murder? The Wound Man? It looks like it could be—” He freezes. “Wait. It’s got to be!”

He is practically glowing when he turns to us and it’s an unnerving change of pace. I reach for Beanie’s hand to find her already reaching for mine. “It’s got to be one of the ones from the Wound Man murder, or at least from the same house! Remember how one of the stolen swords from the walls wasn’t accounted for on the body? This could be it, connecting the murders together!”

With that, he rushes over to Hazel and Lavinia, leaving me holding a blood-covered machete in one hand and my girlfriend’s hand the other.

* * *

Alexander skids across the grass towards us, shouting that he’s realised something. I grin at him, and I watch him glance down at the man’s empty eye sockets and gag. “Christ.”

“I can’t stand it!” I complain, covering my eyes. It makes me feel sick to the pit of my stomach. “Lavinia, you don’t mind poking weird things.”

They snort. “Could’ve phrased that one better, Wong.”

“ _ Please  _ can you shut the eyes?” I beg, not even caring about the joke that they made. “It’s so disgusting.”

I hear a rather disgusting noise, followed by them saying, “God, are eyelids supposed to be this hard to move? I suppose he is dead so— what the  _ fuck _ is that?”

Despite the fact that I know I’ll regret it, I open my eyes and stare down at the buttons stitched onto the eyelids with an almost loving care, and I think that I might be sick.

Alexander is surprisingly more active on that front than I am. When I force myself to look up again, he has gone very pale with a tinge of sickly green, and then he scrambles away and crouches down behind a bush. I try not to hear the retching noises, and I fail.

* * *

People come to take the body away so that it can be taken to the forensic lab and analysed. Kitty and Lavinia are examining the area for any other evidence, and Hazel has taken Alexander back to his flat — she even volunteered to drive. I am sitting on the grass, on a plastic bag, wearing gloves and fiddling with the microphone pack.

Why go to the trouble of cutting the wire? Why not take the entire thing? I have a coat with big pockets that could fit the thing and it’s not like the killer travelled light: they brought a machete and left with eyeballs, buttons, a microphone wire, and a pocket square.

I sit there, puzzling over the problem like it’s a set of sums from school, and messing around with the microphone pack, when I realise that all my jiggling and fidgeting has made the tiny little screws that hold the back to the front come loose, and I can see a little bit of the circuits inside. In a panic, I try to press it all back together because  _ it’s important evidence _ but instead the screws wriggle around and come out even more and I’m about to panic and shout for Kitty’s help when I notice something.

There is a piece of paper inside the microphone pack, torn just like the note inside the shoe, and I decide that I have to see it. The microphone pack isn’t anything compared to this. I pull at the plastic until the screws fully close loose and I’m staring at the piece of paper, laying on a weird nest of complicated circuits with an eye drawn on it in blotchy red ink.

It does look like ink this time, I think. It’s paler than the blood on the note, and it’s got the swoops and stops and starts that make it look like it was written with Hazel’s fancy fountain pen. I can’t imagine the kind of crazy person who would put blood in a fountain pen (surely it would ruin the pen? And fountain pens can be expensive!), so it is probably just red pen ink. It certainly looks like the same stuff that decorated my assignments at school when I was younger.

“Kitty,” I say in a shivery voice, and then I say it louder because she didn’t hear me the first time. “Kitty, there’s a  _ note _ !”

* * *

I have a very bad dream that night, worse than any nightmare I have ever had about a case. I wake up in a horrible sweat tangled in the covers to Kitty stroking my hair and singing in my ear. We talk about it for almost an hour, and I nearly doze off. However, she insists that I go and take a shower while she changes the sheets on our bed. She dries my hair and plaits it for me and then we go back to bed, and I feel happy and safe, and much more loved than poor afraid Alexander must feel.

However, my brain won’t  _ shut up _ .

I lay there with Kitty curled around me as I stare the ceiling, and I think, and I decide something that I have never decided before. I am going to tell a lie, and keep a secret, and detect all on my own.


	14. and now, the end is near

I wake up to Kitty cooking breakfast and singing in the kitchen, and I remember my missions.

“Beans!” she greets me, and she sweeps me into a hug.

I lean up for a kiss. “Kitty! I’m going to go and visit Mummy today.”

Kitty squeezes my hand before directing me to the duty of cracking the eggs. “Give her love from me, yeah? I have some  _ plans _ for us tomorrow.”

When I look over at her, she is raising her eyebrow at me with a smirk on her face. I brandish a spatula at her and try not to blush, and mentally rehearse what I’m going to do today.  _ Excuse me, sir or ma’am. I am a detective with the Priestley Investigative Agency and I would appreciate it if you could rush this through testing as fast as possible: a life may depend on it.  _ It sounds good, and packs a Hazel-ish punch.

We eat breakfast while Kitty complains about her little sister. “She’s got a  _ boyfriend _ , the little goblin! I wonder how long before he goes running for the hills?”

“She did date that guy who we were reasonably sure was a serial killer,” I remind her. “I hope that this guy is better.”

When I finish my plate, Kitty tells me that she’ll do the washing up while I get dressed, and kisses me goodbye before I leave. Then she shuts the door while blowing silly kisses and I am all alone.

* * *

I take the note from the board in Hazel and Alexander’s office, careful not to touch it any more than I already have. It drops into a Ziploc bag that I hold out and I have my evidence in my hand, the physical reminder of what I am about to do. After that, I am walking to the Tube station, following the map on my phone so closely that I almost walk into several annoyed businessmen and boisterous tourists. “Excuse me, sir or ma’am,” I mutter under my breath as I walk, going back over my planned lines. “I am a detective with the Priestley Investigative Agency and I would appreciate it if you could rush this through testing as fast as possible: a life may depend on it.”

_ A life may depend on it. _

I hate that I’m not lying. I ought to be lying. I wish that I was lying.

When I get to the Tube station, there are pedallers waving newspapers, shouting, “THE SOUVENIR RIPPER STRIKES AGAIN! Read an exclusive interview with Hazel Wong!”

I know that they’re lying, because Hazel doesn’t give interviews to anybody but Daisy Wells, who has yet to write her article.

_ MARKED BY A KILLER _ one headline screams, big enough that even I can understand it. Emblazoned in bright ink and hazy in the muffled light of the station is a photo of Alexander’s cheek, stitched up and bloody. I don’t want to know who took it.

* * *

I arrive at the forensics lab feeling rather dizzy, unsure whether or not it’s from the air inside the tube station or the fact that I am in the  _ dead body building _ on my own. I breathe through my mouth because the air smells funny, like my clothes after a crime scene, and everything is polished and clean like a corpse scrubbed clean of all life. Fixing my eyes on the desk, I make my way over and say, in my most confident voice, “Excuse me, ma’am.”

The woman behind the desk looks up. “What can I do for you, sweetie?” she asks in a honeyed voice, concerned. “Are you lost?”

Whereas being thought of young and naive infuriates Hazel, it merely makes me upset and embarrassed. However, I manage to swallow down that mortifying hot feeling and hold out the note in its Ziploc bag. “I am a detective with the Priestley Investigative Agency and I would appreciate it if you could rush this through testing as fast as possible: a life may depend on it.”

Her eyes are wide and startled. I take out my identification card. “Here. My name is Rebecca Martineau, I’m a researcher but I’ve been taking a more hands-on role with this case, we need it.”

As if trying to find the lie, she stares at me. I stare back. “ _ Alexander Arcady  _ is in danger,” I tell her in my most confident, Hazel-ish, voice. “Please rush this through.”

“Alright, I will pass this along. Wait in that chair over there for me, please.”

I nod, almost falling over from how hard I breathe out as I rush to sit down. I did it.

* * *

Forty-five minutes later, I am informed that they rushed it through as fast as possible with delays. “I’m sorry that it has taken so long,” the woman who comes to see me says apologetically.

“It’s perfectly alright!” I rush to assure her. “Really. I know that there’s sometimes… not as much assistance as you’d like there to be. What are the results?”

She passes me a piece of paper, apologising again. I see words such as  _ positive _ and  _ mixture _ but they are not falling into strict sentences, and I say, “I’m sorry, I’m dyslexic. Could you please tell me what the results were?”

“I’m so sorry, of course,” she said  _ again _ , taking it back and sitting down beside me. “They tested the ink and found that somebody has mixed blood with red ink.”

My breath gets stuck in my throat. I was right.  _ I was right _ . “Could you possibly…” Steadying my breathing, I try again. “Could you possibly test to see if you have this person on file? I would appreciate knowing if they are somebody key to our investigation.”

The idea that the killer has written with their own blood makes my body tingle all over, and I can hardly sit still and listen to my podcasts while I wait for these results. Much quicker this time, the forensic scientist comes back with a grim look on her face. “Miss Martineau?” she calls.

I bounded up from my chair, too excited to pretend that I wasn’t growing more anxious with each second. “Yes? What is it?”

“We have the results of the test done on the blood and it appears…” She swallows, looking pale as she hands me the papers inside a plastic wallet. “It appears that it is the blood of one  _ Alexander Arcady _ .”

* * *

I vaguely know the way to Alexander’s flat and that will have to be enough. I change twice on the Underground — isn’t it supposed to only be once? — and I try to find his house, get lost and hail a cab, can’t remember the address, and go back into the Underground to work my way back through what I did. When I eventually wind up outside his flat, I am breathless and tearful and my hair is awry, and all I can do is still my sobs for long enough to open the door.

“Alexander!” I gasp, but he is not the person standing at the door. Instead, there is a handsome young man, impeccably dressed with tousled hair and his collar skewed. “I— I’m so sorry, I’m interrupting, I’ll—”

“Hey, you’re alright. You aren’t interrupting, you’re clearly upset.” His voice is comforting and warm, and he calls back into the flat, “Alex!”

Alexander scrambles to the door, in a slightly more distressed state. “Beanie! Are you alright?”

I shake my head, wiping my eyes furiously. Shooting concerned looks at me, George and Alexander lead me into the living room. I sit down on the sofa, my hands trembling as I scramble to undo the buckle on my bag. “I can’t… I  _ can’t _ …”

Ever-so gently, George takes my hand and leads it away from my bag, laying it on my lap and undoing the buckle himself. “Here. Take your time, it’s not slipping away from you.”

“It is from Alexander!” I blurt nonsensically, and he draws back, abandoning his efforts to his not-boyfriend. “Alexander, I had… an idea. About the case, the note from yesterday.”

He looks sick at the thought, pressing a tissue into my hand from where he kneels in front of me. “Oh?”

“I took the note to the forensics lab — I lied to Kitty, I told her I was visiting Mummy — and they confirmed that it’s… it’s red ink, mixed with blood.” Finally, I get it out, the words that I swallowed when the assistant told me and only spat back in that moment. 

“Christ.” Alexander stumbles to his feet with wide eyes, as if looking for something to note this down on. To my left, George looks like he’s about to vomit. “Can this killer just… not? For once in their life?”

While he is still reeling, looking like he is about to fall down dead, I take a deep breath and breathe out, “Alexander, it’s  _ your  _ blood.”

“ _ What? _ ” It comes out strangled, pained, half-dead. His eyelids flutter and he sways on his feet and George is up just in time to break his fall when he passes out. I can’t move; the sight is horrifying, as if Alexander has died in George’s arms.

“Beanie,” he says, gruff but kind, “could you help me?”

Together, though I am fumbling and awkward, we lay him down on the sofa. I sit back on my heels on the floor, unsure of what to do. Crouching by his head, George has no such doubts. He murmurs, “Love? Alex, wake up,” and strokes his face, caressing his injured cheek and assuring him that he is, in this moment, alright.

The sight strikes me like a knife. It reminds me, so vividly, of the dream that woke me up in a cold sweat last night, a vision of a faceless killer crouching over Alexander and taking his eyes from his head. As George kisses his forehead and runs his hands through his hair, the image of Alexander’s eyes being coughed from their sockets floats over the top and makes me want to vomit. 

“Beanie, he’s waking up,” George says, looking away from Alexander briefly to smile at me. “Could you go and get a glass of water for him to drink when he wakes up, please?”

Nodding frantically, I rush to the kitchen and fill a glass, trying to will the image from my head. My mind is being awful and it should not be allowed to win. I carry the glass back with trembling hands and set it on the side table.

Finally, I allow myself to look at Alexander. Both of his eyes are inside his head and he is smiling at George as if he’s going to burst at any moment from love. “Hey,” I whisper. “Are you okay?”

He nods. “Just shocked. And dizzy. What are we going to  _ do _ ?”

For once, I am Hazel-ish: I know exactly what we are going to do. “ _ You _ aren’t going to do anything!” I tell him sternly. “I’m going to call Priestley and sort everything out. All you need to do is relax and spend the day with George recovering from this shock. Got it?”

“You’re the best, Beanie,” he says hazily, a grin in his face. 

As serious as possible, I reply, “You’re delirious.”

* * *

Beanie leaves with a thermos flask of hot chocolate and a borrowed umbrella, and George settles back down beside me, running a hand through my hair tenderly.

“Are you okay?” I ask, because there is a curiously contemplative look fixed on his face, his gaze somewhere over my head.

He is focused on where Beanie stood last, waving and grinning in the doorway with one foot out in the hall. “Nice girl,” he remarks.


	15. your silence is my favourite sound

“Hazel,” Kitty says when I answer the phone, sounding grim, “don’t bother coming into the office. Go straight to the Millenium Banking Offices, I’ll send you the address.”

“Oh.” I pick up my bag and walk over to the counter when they call my name. Nodding my thanks, I take my hot chocolate and say, “There’s been another murder? Is Alexander alright?”

She sighs. “Stressed but not dead. He says—”

“HI, HAZEL!” I hear him shout distantly, followed by Beanie’s giggles.

Kitty laughs. “Yeah, that. He’s texting George.”

“Of course he is,” I say, rolling my eyes at the idea and hovering a little way away from the counter, taking care to ignore the stares of the people in the cafe. “Do you want me to grab you anything before I come to the crime scene? Is it definitely the Ripper?”

“I don’t know what isn’t these days but it may not be.” After a pause, she adds, “Can you grab me a bagel?”

“I’ll be there in twenty. What do you take on your bagels again?” There are several people staring at me now but I try to ignore them. In an almost Daisy-ish way, I want to shock them. Maybe quotes from the conversation will make it into the newspapers, showing how used to crime we are. Showing how imperative it is that this crime is solved and that us detectives are not to be joked with or made fun of. The teasing that Alexander has suffered at the hands of the media has made me vindictive, it seems. “Oh, and how much blood is there at the crime scene?”

“Not that much. Only one pair of ruined shoes, but we can’t find the damn murder weapon.”

“Oh, no, who ruined their shoes? You know how to get blood out of things, you’re the best at it out of all of us.” Kitty truly does have a talent for making blood simply vanish from our clothes after they’ve been deemed beyond saving. Even the inspector had to admit to being impressed after she saved one of his hats. Thinking of the murder weapon, I say, “Get Alexander standing on something, it’s probably been stuck high up, somewhere neither of us can reach. The Ripper is… annoying like that.”

I am horrifyingly complacent with murder now, I realise. Lavinia often jokes that it’s only a matter of time before I’m murdering people myself, like I’m not far too moral for that. “Good idea!” Kitty takes the phone away to order somebody to do her bidding — no doubt some poor intern at the bank or a confused policeman, Kitty does have her commanding way with men — before returning to the call. “Right, Hazel, I have to go. Any more questions?”

“Nothing much. I’ll be there in twenty.”

* * *

That twenty minutes is actually forty — there’s a tube strike, as usual — and when I arrive, Alexander and Beanie are both a bit green when I arrive. Alexander in particular is picking at his stitches and making rather a mess of his blue gloves, while Beanie is hurrying around and doing anything but looking at the corpse.

“Quite the scene,” I say, swallowing down sickness that rises in my throat. “Anything to glean from it?”

“Nothing.” Kitty is slumped in a chair outside the exclusion zone of tape blockading the hallway. “It’s the Ripper and that’s all we know. There’s not the print of a shoe, not a note, no DNA evidence. We even went over it all with UV light. That was Vin’s idea.”

I look to where Lavinia is signalling for a nearby first aider to patch up Alexander’s profusely bleeding cheek. “Sounds like them. They’ve been watching too much Miss Fisher recently.”

Laughing, Kitty picks up the case file from the next chair and invites me to sit down. “Not much interesting about the man. He’s a Chinese banker, obviously. He’s got four children, three daughters and a son. His oldest daughter is deceased — murdered, ironically, ten years ago.”

My breath gets stuck somewhere in my throat, lodging deep inside and aching until it hurts. “No.  _ No. _ ”

“Hazel?” Giving me a weird look, she clasps her hand over mine. “Hazel, what’s wrong?”

“My dad is a banker,” I gasp, fumbling for my phone, turning my screensaver towards her. Underneath a text from Daisy —  _ Fuck, that’s awful. Keep me posted and don’t overwork yourself, okay? Let me know if you’re free in your lunch break xxx  _ — is a photo of me and my father, both of us round-faced and beaming into the camera. “My dad is a banker and… and he had four children, one son and three daughters and… and  _ I’m the eldest _ .”

* * *

Despite the protests of Alexander and Kitty, I agree to accompany the body to the morgue. Lavinia offers to drive Beanie back to the office — she looks queasy at the thought, because Lavinia is not exactly a relaxing driver. When I leave the Millenium Banking Offices, Kitty appears to be standing pleasantly beside Alexander. On a second look, I see that she has his arm twisted behind his back to prevent him from moving an inch, and Alexander’s phone pressed between her shoulder and her cheek as she makes a call, glaring at him all the while and offering him tissues to daub his cheek. He has scratched it raw, all the stitches coming loose and the cuts open and bloody.

“Yes, there’s no need to worry, I’m taking him to A an’ E to get it patched up,” she says into his phone, a serious look on her face. No doubt talking to George. “He wanted to let you know but he’s currently in no fit state to hold a phone to his cheek. Hands  _ covered _ in blood.”

“Kitty, I could have made the call myself,” he argues.

She smiles at him and twists his arm. “You were saying? I’ve currently got him by the wrist to make sure that he doesn’t scarper away from medical attention.”

“Kitty, let go, I can manage myself,” he complains through gritted teeth, half-heartedly tugging and pulling against her grip.

“Bold words for a man within tickling distance, Arcady.”

Kitty ends the call on George’s laughter, almost dropping Alexander’s phone in the process. Then she attacks him with prodding, reaching fingers and I have to stifle a laugh as I accompany the workers down the stairs and into the van.

* * *

At the morgue, somebody grabs me a chair and pulls back my hair for me, and I sit there as they examine the body from top to bottom, unwilling to move anything yet or even cut the threads sewing his lips together. My hands are clasping my phone in my lap, nineteen missed calls to my father in Hong Kong and a text from my sister.

_ Dad’s asleep and he’ll kill us if we wake him up. You’ve got May bouncing all over and yelling about murder. What on earth has happened? _

_ Don’t worry about it, I panicked, _ I respond.  _ Tell May that I’ll DM her some classified documents if she shushes and goes to bed. _

_ She’s not five anymore, IDK if it’ll work, _ Rose says, and I chuckle.

“What’s the matter, Detective Wong?” asks a morgue assistant that I know well.

“Nothing much, Amobi. My sisters are excited about the news of this murder. Problem is that it’s eleven at night in Hong Kong,” I reply, trying to keep a smile on my face.

“Charming.” He adjusts his gloves. “We think it was poison but we’ll have to analyse the stomach contents. We have a journalist coming in, Miss Wong, just to warn you.”

My breath catches in my throat in a more pleasant way this time. “Who is it?”

“A Daisy Wells? Her name is familiar,” he says, glancing at the computer that is angled away from me.

“Fallingford,” I breathe. “That’s where you’ll know her from. She’s a… a school friend of mine.”

“Speak of the devil and she shall appear, apparently.” He gestures towards the door, at blonde hair and pale skin visible through the distorted glass. “Miss Wells, it’s a pleasure.”

She smiles as she enters. “Likewise, Mister Amobi. Now, what has—  _ Hazel _ !”

“Daisy!” I rise to my feet and she rushes over to clasp my hands. “What a surprise.”

“I’m surprised that I didn’t think you’d be here.” Glancing over to the table, she says, “What’s going on?”

“They’re going to cut the threads on his mouth, I think. Do you… know the details?” I ask, walking over to stand beside the body and adjusting the mask over my mouth.

She nods. “I read the earliest descriptions on the way here. Time of death?”

“Early this morning,” I say, swallowing down the image of somebody grabbing my father from behind and forcing poison down his throat. “He was apparently called in by a coworker working nights who found something odd. Utter rubbish, of course.”

Daisy clasps my hand silently in hers.

Avoiding eye contact with me, Amobi tears a scalpel from its plastic packaging and leans over the body, slitting the threads that sew the mouth shut in one careful movement. He clasps the jaw and carefully pulls it open to ensure that he has cut every thread and a clear liquid pours from his mouth, spilling down onto the table that he is supported on and streaming down the sides of his face.

“What is that?” I breathe, feeling something invisible tighten around my ribcage, a blackout inside my skull creeping at me slowly. “Saliva?”

“No, it’s… it’s not clear, Hazel, look.” Letting go of my hand, Daisy crouches down to stare at the liquid pooling on the sterile white. “It’s  _ blue _ .”

Glancing from side to side to ensure that his higher-ups aren’t anywhere in sight, Amobi leans down and takes a deep breath in, coming up coughing. “Almonds,” he says. “I think it’s safe to assume cyanide.”

“How did… but… what? How does the poison become regurgitated back into the mouth?” I ask, finding my voice and putting together a surprisingly coherent question. “How?”

“They didn’t.” Rearing back from the body, Amobi regards both of us with wide eyes. “The killer waited until he had died and poured it into his mouth, and then sewed his lips together.”

The world feels very far away from my touch. If somebody is saying my name, I cannot hear them.

* * *

When the stitches are tied off, Kitty gives me a sickly-sweet smile and says, “Now, was that so hard?”

“Go fuck yourself,” I reply, and she laughs.

“I’ll drive you home, okay? Or George’s flat. Priestley wants you to take the rest of the day off on the condition that you’re under watch.” She checks her phone and shows me a text message from Priestley, who is the sort of person to properly punctuate his texts and use ellipses in strange places. Lavinia often says that he texts in the same way their step-mum does.

“I can assure you that George will keep me under close watch,” I say as dryly as I can, allowing Kitty to help me out of the room. A fresh bandage has been spread across my cheek to protect me, and there is a particularly painful substance called  _ silver nitrate _ being used to bring down the infection that my own idiocy caused. “I’ll give you his address.”

Google Maps says that there’s a traffic jam en route to George’s flat. I settle back for a ride cruising through traffic. Kitty turns up  _ girl in red _ and prepares herself for taking ill-advised shortcuts. 

* * *

When George opens the door to his flat, Kitty tells him to make sure that I don’t escape out of the window and bids me goodbye with a jokey salute.

George shuts the door and leads me into the living room. When we’re sitting down beside each other, he reaches up to delicately touch the plaster on my cheek. “You poor thing, sweetheart,” he murmurs. “Does it hurt?”

“A hell of a lot,” I reply, leaning into his touch. “I’m so damn sorry for dragging you into this shit. You just wanted… a date. And you’re stuck with this,  _ me _ , being stalked by a serial murderer.”

“I’ll stick by you through all of this,” George says seriously, looking me right in the eyes and squeezing my hand, the other placed on my cheek. “Sincerely, Alex, I mean it. I don’t tell lies.”

“I know you don’t,” I murmur, and I am so fixed on him that I can’t look away. A dangerous warmth spreads through me as I stare, feeling myself being captured and drawn towards him.

Leaning closer, he continues in a low and almost hypnotising voice. “I realise that we’re doing this all in utterly the wrong order but… will you be my boyfriend? I want to seriously stick by you, with a word for all of this.”

“Yes.” I bring my hand up to cover my mouth and I choke on my disbelief and he laughs.

“No need to be so shocked, Alex, can I kiss you?”

I nod and he does, pressing me back against the cushions and murmuring in my ear. “I’m going to compliment you until you forget what this monster thinks about you, until all you can think about is how I think of you.”

“Please,” I say, and suddenly I cannot stop talking, chasing the high of George’s praise falling from his lips and wrapping around me and filling my head with warmth and light. “Please, please, please.”

“Your eyes are beautiful.”

“You’re pretty beyond belief.”

“An angel come to earth.”

“Open your eyes, let me see how pretty they are.”

“My pretty boyfriend.”

I realise, then, when George pulls away to touch my bandaged cheek, that the fog in my mind and the racing of my heart are pleasure devolving into panic. The fear grips my heart and my breath comes faster, and I fall against George with gasps, begging him to stop, stop,  _ stop reminding me of a killer _ .

Even though he holds me, soothes me with apologies while stroking my hair, I cannot stop my gasping. Something inside me is screaming that I am in danger, and my branded cheek stings as if warning me to listen.

I lean into the warmth of George’s embrace and ignore the screaming inside my mind. If there’s one thing I know, it’s that I’m safe with him. 


	16. i’m thinkin’ about the things that are deadly

Beanie flies into work as if trying to outrun something invisible that’s right on her heels. “I have a theory!” she blurts, as if the words are fighting their way out of her mouth against her will.

Kitty rushes in behind her, still plaiting her hair and smiling fondly. “I finally convinced her to tell us all about this theory that she obviously has,” she says, fixing the elastic into the end of her plait and sitting down beside Alexander and I on our usual sofa. “Go on, Beans! You were so excited, I can hardly wait!” She sounds honest as usual, truly dedicated to everything that Beanie has to say. I’m almost jealous.

As Beanie gathers her courage, Kitty gives Alexander a cursory glance before doubletaking and regarding him with alarm. I understand her shock: he looks as if he hasn’t slept in a week. Since Beanie surprised him with the unpleasant news about the note, he has hardly slept a wink. I have been rung at odd hours and calmed Alexander in fits of sobs, George has ditched lectures to come and comfort him, and Priestley has escorted a panicked Alexander out of our offices and into a cab  _ twice _ .

She reaches over and takes his hand in her own, a warm gesture of friendship. He smiles weakly.

“Well…” Beanie fiddles with her hands. “I think that, maybe, the killer could be... two different people?” Her voice gets smaller and smaller as she progresses through her sentence, a whisper by the end.

Amina, who is sitting on the counter with a hot chocolate, cries, “Oh,  _ this _ theory! Goodness, did you not get told when I did?”

Kitty gives Amina an alarmed sideways look and Beanie blushes. “I rang Amina to confirm something, and I told her about it!”

Making a determined ‘hmph’ noise which begins annoyance we know won’t last for more than five seconds, Kitty sits down on the arm of the sofa and turns to Beanie. “Go on, then!”

Taking a deep breath, Beanie fidgets with her shirt from where she is still standing and says, “I looked at the testimonies from people nearby and I know that we’ve decided that the killer is a darker-skinned figure with short hair and that some of the other sightings are mistakes but… I don’t think they are. I think that the killer is two people, either working together or sort of… competing. Like it’s fun to them.”

Alexander pulls a completely disgusted face and says, “Eugh!”

I can’t breathe. It feels true, and right, more than anything else has in this ridiculous damn case, and I hate that it must be so. I miss murders, even though those victims feel so much closer to me than these ever have. I feel closer to the killer than I do to the victims, and that is a terrifying thought.

I glance at Alexander. “If something creepy turns up, it’s on every other body or thereabouts,” I say slowly, and he raises his eyebrows. “So only one of the killers is obsessed with you, not both.”

“Oh, what a great comfort,” he replies sarcastically, slumping down in his seat. “Only  _ one _ person wants to kill me! Truly fantastic!”

When I turn back to Beanie, she looks profoundly wounded. Alexander merely rubs his eyes and looks away. “Sorry.”

We all know about the blood, why he’s upset. He doesn’t need to say a word. “If we catch one, the other is still out there. And I can only hope that we catch the bastard who is making me cry blood.”

I have never heard him sound so bitterly vindictive in all his life, and I am almost afraid to reach out and comfort him.

* * *

Felix Mountfitchet’s office is a comfortable affair, and I am slightly annoyed that he has managed to weasel enough information out of me to stop our sessions being a gated game of ping pong.

“It’s like… I feel like somebody is following me.” I try not to look over my shoulder like I’ve been doing so much recently. Beanie says that I’ve frightened her into thinking that someone is following her around the office. George, who likes to surprise me when we meet up for dates by wrapping his arms around me from behind, has been startled by me screaming several times. It’s become a problem, and you’re supposed to tell problems to therapists, so I do.

“Following you?” Felix encourages, and I realise that I’ve become lost in thought.

“Yes.” I tug on my cuff and don’t look at him. “Like I could turn around at any given moment and… there someone is, ready to pluck my eyes out. Only the feeling doesn’t go away when I realise that it’s somebody I know behind me. If it turns out to be Hazel or George behind me, it gives me a fright and I laugh, but I don’t stop feeling like they’re going to hurt me.”

He leans back and regards me with very blue eyes.  _ Eyes _ . I notice them now. I find myself looking into mirrors and blinking, fluttering my lashes and pressing my fingers against my closed eyes, making sure that they are still there underneath the pads of my fingers while trying to ignore the heart-shaped burns scarring there. Each morning, I am afraid that they’re going to be missing when I wake up in the early hours of the morning, in a cold sweat with a choked scream at the edge of my throat.

George kisses my all over my faces and makes me laugh, calling me beautiful and pretty and stroking my hair, but it no longer makes me feel safe. Nothing can anymore.

The silence is oppressive, bearing down on me like a chokehold, and I can hardly breathe. I can talk, though. I’m good at that. “It’s like… something inside my so desperately wants me to find this killer — I mean, these  _ killers _ — it’s making me fear people that I… that I love. Hazel, Beanie…  _ George _ . He’s been nothing but patient with me throughout this and yet… I’m afraid of him. I feel cruel for it but I can’t help it.”

Felix offers some advice that I don’t hear and asks me to reiterate the history of mine and George’s relationship to try and find the cause of this association of George with the ripper. Perhaps it’s because I met him while on the case, he suggests. However, his advice lacks the usual depth and warmth that I am used to, and I follow his distracted gaze to find it falling on a photo on a nearby shelf, of a beaming and blonde little girl who is vaguely familiar. I reach up to my hair, running a hand through it, and try to make deductions. Maybe I remind him of that girl? Why else would he look so suddenly thoughtful?

It’s all I can think of. I don’t know how to think anymore. 

* * *

“Somebody else is dead!” Priestley shouts from his office.

I almost fall out of my chair trying to scramble to the door, Alexander on my heels. “WHO?” he shouts down the hall, and we burst into Priestley’s office to see him grim-faced, toying with a business card that I vaguely recognise.

“An old friend of mine,” he mumbles, looking years older than he is as he drags a hand down his face. We both stare for a moment, gripping each other’s hands for comfort, and comprehension dawns on Priestley’s face. With wide eyes, he looks up at us. Horror creeps into the tips of my fingers. “I’m sorry, Alexander. It’s Felix Mountfitchet.”


	17. silence all the sweet little things you said

He was murdered in his office.

It looks as if nothing else was moved during the event, which both impresses and disgusts me. Alexander, with shaking hands, points out that everything is exactly where it ought to be. “I say there, right there! Only yesterday, and he was  _ alive _ —”

I catch his hand and say, “Alexander. Just hold onto me. You don’t need to look at the body.”

“What use is a fucking detective that doesn’t look at bodies, Hazel?” he snaps.

Flinching, I say, “You’re of more use to me if you’re sane. Please, Alexander? For me?”

He nods, defeated. “I’ll… I’ll go and look at the security footage.”

“Thank you,” I reply softly. “You’ve got this.”

The victim is spread-eagled in the centre of the room, head tipped back and his throat slit, something drawn onto his cheek. As I walk over to inspect his face, the state of his eyes, I realise, awfully, where I know him from.

_ Daisy’s Uncle Felix.  _ He was never Felix Mountfitchet to me. I met him once, at Fallingford, where he was laughing and joking and very much alive. A sick feeling rises inside my throat and I realise that I am drooping, unable to hold myself up. “Kitty!” I gasp, staggering to my feet. “Kitty— Kitty—”

Ever the prompt and polished one of our group, she is at my side in an instant, practically catching me in her arms and helping me out of the room without asking any questions. Beanie and Lavinia cry, “What’s going on?” as we pass them, but I pay no attention.

I vomit in the hallway, onto the polished floorboards, and I can’t stop shaking. Terrifyingly, my own limbs are out of my control, and it is all I can do to bow my head and cry with trembling shoulders. I am sick and again and again, and I have never felt less like a detective in my life.

* * *

With two of our best detectives incapacitated, I am at my wit’s end but ever more determined. Beanie is with Alexander, looking at footage, while Lavinia has loaded Hazel into a taxi and personally escorted her back to her flat (I firmly told them that no, taking Hazel on their motorbike was  _ not _ acceptable).

Being alone in the room with a body is unsetting, so I call for Priestley, who is conducting some rudimentary interviews, and then crouch down beside the corpse.

I try and focus away from something that has been seemingly written on his cheek, covered up with dried and mottled blood. Clearing that blood away will be easy, but other clues could very well be time-sensitive. The shirt is buttoned oddly, I notice, tugged to the side as if done by someone left-handed. Only… Felix was right-handed, that’s plain to see from his office. Which means that it was buttoned by a right-handed person from  _ outside _ .

“Priestley!” I shout and turn to see him standing at the door.

“What is it, Kitty?” he asks in a serious and business-like tone, crouching down beside me.

I gesture to the shirt and then to my own, and explain what I think. Nodding, Priestley reaches for a pair of gloves and offers me some too, and he begins to unbutton Felix’s shirt while I clear away the blood drying around whatever has been marked onto his cheek, obscuring the words. Priestley, who never swears around us because he still considers us young, says, “Holy fuck.”

Writing on bodies is far too common nowadays. Emblazoned across his cheek in a crude stick-and-poke is ‘YOU WERE GETTING TOO CLOSE’ and a shallow carving on his chest reads ‘ALEXANDER SHOULD STAY ALONE’.

“Hm.” I look side to side and away from his gaze, only to see the carvings again. “Do you think Alexander is in danger?”

“I don’t know, Kitty,” he says honestly. “I just don’t know.”

“PRIESTLEY!” Beanie shrieks from down the hall, and I am on my feet in an instant, running down the hall and into the surveillance room, where Beanie and Alexander were watching the footage. At the door, Beanie is hanging onto the doorframe and waving us in frantically. “Kitty, Kitty, come and look, just… we’ve got something.”

On the crackling footage, black and white and pixellated, the car park comes into view. Late at night, past the clinic’s opening hours, but with lights still on in the building.

A figure wearing a hooded coat and heavy clothes emerges from the edge of the frame, a bag slung over his shoulder. They pause to look at the office hours board for a moment, head dipped down. Then they adjust their hood, revealing hands of a darker colour. Turning to their left, they catch sight of somebody, and seconds later a second figure strides into the frame. Nothing about their person is discernable apart from delicate, pale, fingers.

Words crackle from the speakers, shrieking over the footsteps and the rustling wildlife and the light breathing. “Done it.”

The screen goes black.

“A wire was cut,” Alexander explains breathlessly. He’s curled up in one of the swivel chairs, knees drawn to his chest and eyes peering hauntingly out of his face in a ghoulish manner. I wonder if he has slept or eaten. The blackened areas under his eyes give me an answer. “If you go through and look at the timings, the one on the corner of the building goes out first, but all you see is a pale hand in the frame before the picture dies. It takes about twenty seconds to kill the whole network of cameras.”

“If we weren’t sure that it was two killers before…” I mumble, using a nearby chair as support. Priestley offers his arm and helps me sit down in the chair, and takes the one beside me for himself.

“So… that one about Alexander, that’s the killer that’s obsessed with him,” he says, talking to himself rather than me. “And the one on his cheek is the other killer. They’ve been done by different hands, I reckon.”

“The one on his cheek,” Alexander gasps out, “was about me?”

Priestley and I look at each other. Neither of us mind confirming bad news but we hate being the one to break it. “Alexander,” Priestley begins, leaning forward to place a hand on her shoulder, “It’s quite alright. You’re in no danger, you’re under constant watch. Nothing can hurt you, not with us around.”

He takes a deep, shuddering breath. “What if they kill me?”

I don’t think that any of us have an answer to that.

* * *

I call Daisy. Lavinia sits on the sofa and makes themselves comfortably at home, feet on the coffee table and flicking through channels on the TV, which is considerately muted. “Daisy,” I gasp out. “Someone… someone else died.”

“I know.” Her voice is hollow and she sounds sick, as if part of her heart has washed away and her words are echoing around inside it. “The police called. Who would kill him? Who would hurt Uncle Felix, he only ever helped people!”

“Shh, Daisy, shh,” a distant voice soothes from the other end of the line. I recognise the low, rhythmic tones to be her brother’s, wrought with tears. “Look, it’s okay, Daisy, just… breathe, Daisy darling. Shh.”

Her sobs start up again and I am shocked once again by how emotional she is, changed since we were younger. “I’ll call you again later, Daisy,” I say, and hang up the phone.

When I turn to Lavinia, they only shrug. “I’m sorry, Hazel.”

“What if they’re trying to hurt people close to Daisy?” I ask, and Lavinia picks up their phone, offering it out to me.

“Text Priestley, if you want.”

I do.

* * *

“Alexander,” Hazel gasps on the other end of the line, and I roll onto my side and away from George, trying to keep my voice down. “Oh, Alex, I can’t stop thinking… thinking about that body. The carving… you’re in danger!”

“I’m perfectly safe,” I reply in a whisper, as if I do not wake up in a cold sweat most nights, fearing a murderer hovering over me. Kitty told me to imagine a melon-baller as their chosen weapon, and it’s made me slightly less panicked just at the idea of the sheer ridiculousness of the thought. “I’m just… I’m laying beside George, and we’re just fine. No murder can get into this flat without getting through an alarm system and both of us.”

“But…” She takes a deep breath and sobs. “I don’t want you to die. You’re the only person that I’m sure isn’t a murderer.”

George is deep in sleep, one hand curled against my back, and I close my eyes, murmuring, “This will all be over soon. We can catch these killers, I swear on my life.”

“Stay. Please.”

“Of course.”

She puts her phone on speaker, and I do the same, and we fall asleep to each other’s breathing, hers marred by tears that I want to wipe away.


End file.
